Scope Conditions Podcast

In this episode of Scope Conditions, we ask: what happens when your favorite candidate isn’t even running?

We often think about the quality of democratic representation in terms of the outcomes that citizens get. For instance, we compare the policies a government enacts to what citizens say they want in surveys. Alternatively, we might compare the demographic characteristics of the candidates who make it into office with the demographic makeup of their constituents. 

Our guest today, Dr. Sergio Montero, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester, argues that, if we want to understand representation, it’s helpful to take a step back from the outcomes voters get and to start thinking about the alternatives available to them. If many voters don’t get what they want out of politics, is that because their preferred candidates are losing elections – or because the candidates they’d like to see aren’t even running? After all, if the option you want isn’t even on the menu, there’s a good chance you won’t be happy with the outcome. 

We talk with Sergio about a new paper he has written with Matias Iaryczower and Galileu Kim that develops a novel approach to measuring representation failures in terms of what’s missing from the menu of options. Their approach involves comparing what voters want to the range of candidates available. A big part of the challenge here is figuring out what it is voters want in the first place. This isn’t just a problem of knowing which policies voters prefer, but also identifying what individual characteristics – like gender or level of education – they look for in a legislator. And, crucially, Sergio and his coauthors need a way of assessing how voters trade off between the two: how much voters care about policy positions compared to personal qualities.

We talk with Sergio about how he and his coauthors uncover voter preferences as well as how they place candidates in an ideological space. And we hear what they find when they use their approach to assess the quality of representation in Brazil. We also get into some interesting conceptual questions around what the normative representational standard ought to be: for instance, if it turns out that voters prefer male candidates with business backgrounds, should we call it a representation failure if the slate of options is more female and more working class? And should we call it a democratic deficiency if more extreme voters don’t see their ideal candidates on the ballot?

Today on Scope Conditions, we’re speaking with Dr. Dana El Kurd, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Richmond, about her recent book, Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine. In this book, Dana seeks to unravel a puzzle of Palestinian political development. With the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1994, Palestinians gained the prospect of democratic self-government, with the establishment of an elected Palestinian National Authority and a process intended to culminate in the creation of a Palestinian state. The Palestinian people entered Oslo with a highly mobilized and well-organized civil society — conditions that should, in theory, have set the stage for vibrant civic engagement and the development of responsive institutions.

What Dana observes, however, in the period after Oslo is just the opposite. Not only did Palestinian institutions evolve in an increasingly authoritarian direction, but Palestinian society ended up far less mobilized and much more polarized than it had been under direct Israeli rule. “How,” Dana asks in her new book, “did the [Palestinian Authority] demobilize society, when years of Israeli occupation had failed to do the same thing?” Her argument is that international interference distorted the process of political development, leading the PA to practice a form of “indigenous” autocracy that proved highly effective at dis-organizing and deactivating civil society.

We hear about how Dana brought together interviews with Palestinian officials, protest data, survey experiments and lab experiments to trace out the dynamics of demobilization. We also ask her to reflect on how her argument travels: Does international involvement generally serve to undercut democracy? Is political polarization always demobilizing? Lastly, Dana reflects on her experiences as a Palestinian researcher studying Palestine: both the access that her identity gives her in the field and the ways in which her work is challenged due to her identity.

Today’s episode is Part 2 of our conversation about metaketas with Dr. Tara Slough, an Assistant Professor of Politics at NYU, who co-led with Daniel Rubenson a metaketa on the governance of natural resources that was published this year in PNAS; and Dr. Graeme Blair, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA, who co-led a metaketa with Fotini Christia and Jeremy Weinstein testing the effects of community policing. The main paper from that project was just published last month in Science.

In Part 1, we learned what a metaketa is, how it’s typically organized, and what the benefits are of having coordinated teams experimentally test the same (or very similar) interventions across multiple contexts. We also talked about each of the two EGAP metaketas that Tara and Graeme co-led – the first on natural resource governance and the second on community policing. 

In today’s episode, we talk with Tara and Graeme about deeper conceptual issues, practical constraints, and equity considerations around metaketas. It’s fairly simple to interpret the results if we find the same effect across settings -- but what do we conclude if we see different treatment effects across the different sites? We also ask how far metaketas can get us toward generalizability: it’s one thing to compare results across 6 test sites, but can we extrapolate to other contexts outside of the metaketa?

And while metaketas are a powerful tool, we also learn from Tara and Graeme about their challenges and limitations. What was it like coordinating across six research teams, all with their own local constraints, timelines, and publication incentives? What are the equity concerns that come up when so many resources are allocated to a single question? And we talk about the professional considerations that scholars, particularly junior scholars, should keep in mind when signing up to participate in a metaketa.

As a reminder, we left off in Part 1 discussing how to pool estimates across study sites to get an average treatment effect. This is where we pick up the conversation. 

For references to all the academic works discussed in this episode, visit the episode webpage at https://www.scopeconditionspodcast.com/episodes/episode-24-randomizing-together-part-2-with-tara-slough-and-graeme-blair

The last two decades have seen an explosion of field experimentation in political science and economics. Field experiments are often seen as the gold standard for policy evaluation. If you want to know if an intervention will work, run a randomized controlled trial, and do it in a natural setting. Field experiments offer up a powerful mix of credible causal identification and real-world relevance.

But there’s a catch: if you’ve seen one field experiment, you’ve seen one field experiment. A field experiment is essentially a case study with strong causal evidence. So you now know something about the effects of foreign aid or canvassing or social contact in one corner of the real world – but will those interventions have the same effect in other contexts? 

And if someone else runs their own experiment on the same intervention in some other setting, they’ll probably do it in their own way, shaped by their own pet theory, the demands of their funder, or the interests of their local partner. So, at the end of the day, how will we combine or compare the results? How can learning cumulate if everyone’s doing their own thing?

One promising answer to these questions is the metaketa framework, pioneered by EGAP, the Evidence in Governance and Politics research network. In a metaketa, several teams of researchers coordinate on a harmonized cluster of randomized trials carried out across disparate contexts. So far, EGAP teams have run or planned metaketas on topics such as the role of information in democratic accountability, taxation, and women’s participation in public service advocacy. The idea is that, by running parallel experiments across diverse settings, we’ll learn something about the generalizability of effects.

Our guests today have just finished running two metaketas and join us to reflect on the promise and challenges of learning from coordinated field experiments. Dr. Tara Slough, an Assistant Professor of Politics at NYU, co-led with Daniel Rubenson a metaketa on the governance of natural resources that was published this year in PNAS. Dr. Graeme Blair, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA, co-led a metaketa with Fotini Christia and Jeremy Weinstein testing the effects of community policing. The main paper from that project was just published last month in Science. 

We had such a wonderful, in-depth conversation with Tara and Graeme that we’re dividing it into two parts. In today’s episode, we hear about the projects themselves: the interventions they were evaluating, how they were set up, and what they found. We also talk about the difficulties of choosing and designing a treatment that can be implemented across radically different contexts, and about the analytical subtleties of aggregating estimates across those studies. In Part 2, we’ll get into a set of broader issues surrounding the metaketa strategy, including what coordinated trials can tell us about external validity and the practical challenges of running simultaneous experiments around the world.

For references to all the academic works discussed in this episode, visit the episode webpage at www.scopeconditionspodcast.com/episodes/episode-23-randomizing-together-part-1-with-tara-slough-and-graeme-blair 

Today on Scope Conditions: how the paper-pushers of Empires reshaped colonialism in Southeast Asia. 

Our guest is Dr. Diana Kim, an Assistant Professor at Georgetown’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Hans Kohn member (2021-22) at the Institute for Advanced Studies’ School of Historical Studies. In her award-winning book, Empires of Vice, Diana unpacks the puzzle of opium prohibition in the French and British colonies of Southeast Asia. As she traces out the twists and turns of colonial drug policies, Diana asks how states define the problems they need to solve, and how policymakers come to see crisis in the things they once took for granted. 

For decades, opium was a cornerstone of European colonialism in places like Burma, Malaya, and French Indochina. At their peak, opium taxes made up more than half of all colonial revenues. At the same time, levying a surcharge on what they deemed a peculiarly Asian vice gave the colonizers a sense of moral superiority over their subjects. But over the late 19th and early 20th centuries, colonial governments across Southeast Asia made a sharp reversal toward opium prohibition. 

Why did the French and British choose to crack down on what they had once seen as a fiscal bedrock of empire? How did empires that had grown up so tightly entangled with the opium trade come to see the drug as so deeply troubling? As Diana contends, this dramatic about-face was driven less by dictates from London and Paris and more by the evolving understandings of low-level bureaucrats on the ground in the colonies. Through the day-to-day work of administering policies and keeping records, these minor functionaries developed pet theories, drew casual causal inferences, and constructed new official realities that filtered up to the highest reaches of government – shaping perceptions, issue frames, and policy debates in the metropoles.

We talk with Diana about how imperial drug policies across the region were recast from the bottom-up as rank-and-file bureaucrats puzzled, and often bungled, their way through the everyday challenges of running an empire. We also discuss how Diana pieced together these stories: how she turned troves of archival paperwork, strewn across three continents, into coherent narratives. She tells us how she reconstructed colonial administrators’ interpretive struggles and how she connected the dots from ideas developed on the ground to political debates and decisions back in Europe. 

We also talk with Diana about the unusual portrait she paints of colonial governance: one in which the colonizers assume power before they’ve really figured out what to do with it. Rather than a confident empire imposing its will on its subjects, we see decision-making processes shot through with misperception, unintended consequences, and inner anxieties. We get Diana to reflect on how her account squares with common understandings of imperialism and of the state itself.

For references to all the academic works discussed in this episode, visit the episode webpage at https://www.scopeconditionspodcast.com/episodes/episode-22-why-empires-declared-a-war-on-drugs-with-diana-kim 

Today we are talking about the problem of maintaining social order. In particular, what happens when citizens see the police as ineffective and, in turn, decide to take the law into their own hands? And once mob justice becomes commonplace in a society, what can be done?

In places where the state is weak, citizens often have to take it upon themselves to provide basic public services, such as building schools or collecting the garbage. And, as our guest today tells us, it can also include policing. In parts of the world where the police are seen as corrupt or inept, ordinary citizens often turn to what’s known as mob vigilantism. Groups will form spontaneously to apprehend and inflict violence – sometimes extreme violence – upon those they suspect of committing crimes. In some places, mob justice is exceedingly common: in South Africa, for instance, the police registered two mob vigilante murders per day in 2018 (and that is likely an undercount). 

Mob vigilantism represents a deep breakdown in citizen trust in the state’s ability to maintain social order. Is there anything that governments or civil society can do to boost confidence in the state and, in turn, head off mob violence? Our guest, Dr. Anna Wilke, has recently completed a novel field experiment to address this question in the context of South Africa. Currently a postdoctoral fellow with Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) at the University of California, Berkeley, Anna will be joining the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis as an Assistant Professor next fall.

For the experiment, Anna partnered with a local non-profit to test the effects of a simple intervention: the installation of a home-based alarm system. When a resident or intruder triggers the alarm, it directly texts the local police precinct with the geolocation of the household – in principle, allowing the police to find and respond to criminal incidents more quickly. The question Anna asks is: Does enhancing the responsiveness of local law enforcement lead citizens to see the police as more effective and to resort less to mob violence?

In addition to hearing about her findings, we have a great conversation with Anna about the practical and inferential challenges she encountered in implementing and analyzing her experiment. For instance, it turns out that some of the things that make it hard for the state to effectively manage social problems – like the lack of street addresses in informally settled neighborhoods – also make it hard to sample and survey in these places.
 
Anna also had to deal with all the messiness of running an experiment in the real world, rather than in a controlled setting. This includes the possibility that she was not just treating the people she gave the alarm to, but also their neighbors, who might have also perceived themselves as having quicker access to the police.

Finally, we bring Anna’s research into the larger conversation around policing and racial bias, and ask: what does it mean to increase police presence and public reliance on the police when there is also systemic police abuse?

For references to all the academic works discussed in this episode, visit the episode webpage at https://www.scopeconditionspodcast.com/episodes/episode2-1.

By their very nature, autocracies are political systems in which power is highly concentrated; dictators can do pretty much as they please. So dictatorships might seem an unusual place to go looking for institutions: the rules and structures that limit discretion and set bounds on who can do what.

Yet over the last two decades, political scientists studying autocracies have done exactly that. The field has witnessed what Tom Pepinsky has called “an institutional turn” in the study of authoritarianism, with scholars such as Barbara Geddes, Jason Brownlee, and Jennifer Gandhi analyzing how institutions like dominant parties and elected legislatures order political life in autocracies and help ensure the survival of these regimes.

<a href='http://www.annemeng.com/'><em>Dr. Anne Meng</em></a>, an assistant professor of politics at the University of Virginia, began her own research on autocratic institutions with a focus on ruling parties. She eventually came to believe, however, that parties and legislatures were mostly a sideshow, and that she and other scholars of autocratic institutions had been getting something fundamentally wrong. They were too focused on de jure rules that appear constraining and insufficiently focused on de facto power: on whether institutions have any impact on the distribution of actual leverage within the political system.

Anne’s recent book, Constraining Dictatorship, is an analysis of how and why autocrats use institutions to share real power with their rivals, and of how these institutions shape the regime’s long-run trajectory. Anne also argues that the institutions that matter most are devices that we usually overlook, such as succession rules and cabinet appointments.

In our conversation with Anne, we probe the logic of her innovative argument and hear about how she confronted the difficulties of testing it empirically, like how to measure the elusive concept of leader strength. We also talk about the formal model she developed and how it helped her clarify the tradeoffs that leaders confront as they choose between short-term material gains and long-run survival in office.

More broadly, this is a conversation about what it is, fundamentally, that allows institutions to lend order to political life, and about how we can identify meaningful institutional and political change when we see it. You will also want to stay tuned to hear how Anne wrote the bulk of this book in a single semester.

You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.

Our guest today is Dr. Mai Hassan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Mai is the author of a recent book, Regime Threats and State Solutions, about how leaders manipulate the bureaucracy to maintain their hold on power.

Imagine a political system in which the president has the power to hire, fire, and shuffle bureaucrats in the most important state agencies. How would the leader strategically choose to wield this authority? Perhaps she would decide to pack the state with her own supporters -- for example, with members of her ethnic group -- to ensure loyalty and to maximize the chances that presidential edicts will be faithfully carried out.

However, holding power often means striking bargains with rival elites. Usually the best way to do that is to give those rival elites a foothold in the state and to hand out jobs to their supporters. A leader who packs the state has fewer spoils to share.

Mai’s book delves into this core dilemma of power-maintenance: how can leaders keep their friends close and their enemies closer? When do executives opt to share power, and when do they choose to hoard it by staffing the state with loyalists?

In today’s episode, we talk with Mai about her theory of bureaucratic control. It’s an argument in which leaders don’t merely choose bureaucrats based on their loyalties; they also manipulate civil servants’ loyalties and attachments, by strategically placing them and shuffling them across regions of the country.

We also talk about how Mai tests her argument by using a vast original dataset on decades of Kenyan administrative appointments, spanning both the country’s autocratic and democratic periods. And Mai tells us how she stumbled onto the puzzle of bureaucratic manipulation while digging through archival data for an altogether different project.

You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.

This is a conversation about the politics of voting from abroad: in particular, about how governments manipulate emigrants’ access to the ballot in order to protect their own hold on power.

For the most part, elections are events that happen inside a country, as resident citizens cast ballots at local polling stations. However, around the world, about 281 million people live outside the country in which they were born, and a majority of countries give their emigrant citizens the legal right to vote.

The numbers here are not trivial. While exact figures are hard to come by, there are 80 countries around the world that both recognize voting rights for citizens abroad and have emigrant populations that add up to 5% or more of the national population. For countries with competitive elections, emigrant citizens represent a potentially critical voting bloc living outside the country.

Potentially is the key word here, though. For many of these citizens, the right to vote is only hypothetical because their governments often do little to make it practically feasible for them to cast a ballot. While a country like Senegal sets up 750 polling stations around the world, Kenya sets up only 5.

Our guest today, Dr. Elizabeth Iams Wellman, contends that that is no accident. She argues that incumbents strategically suppress -- or expand -- the vote from abroad to suit their electoral needs. A Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Williams College, Beth has recently published two articles on the topic, in the American Political Science Review and African Affairs, and is at work on a book project titled The Diaspora Vote Dilemma.

We talk with Beth about the often-hidden politics of emigrant enfranchisement. She tells us about the places where the vote from abroad has decided elections, such as Italy, Moldova, Romania, and Cape Verde. But we also discuss the tools that governments use to make sure that emigrant voters can’t sway elections -- tools such as limiting polling locations and enforcing strict voter ID laws.

Beth also tells us about her research process, including how she addressed a set of interesting measurement challenges -- such as, how to capture the electoral threat posed by the vote from abroad -- so that she could test her argument statistically for a large set of elections in sub-Saharan Africa. But she also highlights how her qualitative analysis of individual cases revealed competitive dynamics and strategic mechanisms that she could never have extracted from a regression model. And at a time in which most comparativists have found themselves unable to travel for fieldwork, we were intrigued by the remote interviewing that Beth did alongside months of on-the-ground research, and we ask her about her experience with conducting research interviews via video call.

You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.

In this episode of Scope Conditions, we talk about how civilians seek to survive civil war. Our guest is Dr. Justin Schon, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Virginia’s Democratic Statecraft Lab. In his new book, Surviving the War in Syria, Justin examines the repertoires of strategies that civilians choose from as they seek to keep themselves, their families, and their communities safe.

In the West, we often think of migration as the key survival strategy for those threatened by civil violence, probably because migration as the strategy we in the West most readily observe. However, Justin argues that migration, while a common response, is only one of the multiple ways in which civilians seek to survive civil war. Moreover, it is a response that requires money, social connections, and other resources that not all civilians have. Justin highlights an alternative survival strategy, which he calls “community support”: staying in the conflict zone to help friends, family, and neighbors survive.

In this episode, we talk with Justin about how civilians choose among survival strategies. We discuss the nature of the risks that civilians face during civil war; how they seek to manage those risks; and the experiences that shape their choices. More broadly, this is a conversation about how our perspective on conflict and migration shifts as we come to think of civilians in civil war as agents -- making difficult, high-stakes decisions under constraints -- rather than as passive victims of circumstance. We also talk with Justin about his fieldwork, asking him about the practical, inferential, and ethical complexities of the 10 months of interviews that he conducted with refugees in Turkey, Jordan, Kenya, and the U.S.

You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.