{"title":"Peacekeepers Without Helmets: How Violence Shapes Local Peacebuilding by Civilian Peacekeepers","authors":"Allard Duursma, Hannah M. Smidt","doi":"10.1177/00104140231178740","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231178740","url":null,"abstract":"While United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations are increasingly deployed during ongoing violent conflict, they are also increasingly staffed with civilian personnel tasked with peacebuilding at the local level. How does violent conflict affect civilian peacekeepers’ peacebuilding efforts locally? Shifting the research focus from military to civilian peacekeepers, we argue that the latter have various incentives and the capacity to concentrate their local-level peacebuilding efforts in violence-affected areas. We test our argument using novel, georeferenced data on peacebuilding by “Civil Affairs” personnel of the peacekeeping operation in the Central African Republic. Consistent with our expectation, violence positively correlates with civilian peacekeepers’ peacebuilding interventions both within and across localities. Furthermore, mediation analyses suggest that this correlation is not merely due to greater UN military deployments in violence-affected areas. Instrumental variable regression supports a causal interpretation: violence leads to more efforts by civilian peacekeepers. These findings inform expectations and assessments of peacekeeping effectiveness.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45032282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alexsandros Cavgias, R. Corbi, L. Meloni, Lucas M. Novaes
{"title":"Media Manipulation in Young Democracies: Evidence From the 1989 Brazilian Presidential Election","authors":"Alexsandros Cavgias, R. Corbi, L. Meloni, Lucas M. Novaes","doi":"10.1177/00104140231169027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231169027","url":null,"abstract":"We investigate how dominant media networks can manipulate voters in young democracies. During the first presidential election after the democratic transition in Brazil, TV Globo, the largest and most-watched network in the country, unexpectedly manipulated the news coverage of the last debate 2 days before the decisive second round. In a video segment, Globo unfavorably depicted the left-wing candidate, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Using the geographical distribution of broadcaster-specific TV signals and the timing of election events, we identify the effect of the manipulation net of the effect of the debate itself, showing that Globo’s misleading reporting caused Lula to lose millions of votes. Our results showcase how the media can reshape an election in a single stroke, especially where the media is concentrated and politically inexperienced voters have few other sources of information.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47155396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Crises Shape Circles of Solidarity: Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy","authors":"Jeremy Ferwerda, G. Magni, L. Hooghe, G. Marks","doi":"10.1177/00104140231169028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231169028","url":null,"abstract":"How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected boundaries of solidarity? Human-induced crises that impose asymmetric costs tend to sharpen pre-existing divides, but natural disasters often strengthen solidarity. The pandemic possesses properties of both kinds of crisis. In a panel survey conducted in Northern Italy, the initial epicenter of the pandemic, we asked respondents to complete conjoint tasks querying who was likely to violate health guidelines (wave 1) and who should be prioritized for vaccine distribution (wave 2). We find that while discrimination towards the rich is nearly universal, bias against other outgroups depends on ideology and personal experience with the crisis. Leftwing individuals display discrimination towards partisan outgroups, while those on the right display ethnic bias. However, this effect is conditional: those who suffered a significant income loss but no health effects display heightened discrimination, while respondents who experienced COVID-19 as a personal health crisis are less likely to penalize outgroups.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47592731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alexander Horn, Anthony Kevins, Kees van Kersbergen
{"title":"Workfare and Attitudes toward the Unemployed: New Evidence on Policy Feedback from 1990 to 2018","authors":"Alexander Horn, Anthony Kevins, Kees van Kersbergen","doi":"10.1177/00104140231178743","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231178743","url":null,"abstract":"To what extent, and under what conditions, have workfare reforms shaped public opinion towards the unemployed? This article unpacks the punitive and enabling dimensions of the workfare turn and examines how changes to the rights and obligations of the unemployed have influenced related policy preferences. To do so, it presents a novel dataset on these reforms across a diverse set of welfare states and investigates potential feedback effects by combining our data with four waves of survey data from Europe and North America. Results suggest that while enabling measures generate more lenient attitudes towards the unemployed, punitive measures have no clear effect on public opinion – but they do accentuate the gap between the preferences of high- and low-income individuals. This leads us to conclude that the trend towards punitive and enabling measures since the 1980s has not broadly undermined solidarity with the unemployed, though it has increased income-based polarization.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48298190","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Electoral Systems, Partisan Politics, and Income Redistribution: A Critical Quasi-Experiment","authors":"M. Górecki, Michał Pierzgalski","doi":"10.1177/00104140231169018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231169018","url":null,"abstract":"Iversen and Soskice’s notion that electoral rules affect democracies’ propensity for income redistribution is one of the political economy’s most discussed concepts. Yet, it comes with a number of caveats. Most importantly, it is not clear whether electoral rules indeed affect states’ propensity for redistribution or vice versa and thus whether or not Iversen and Soskice’s findings are spurious. In this article, we focus on the critical case of New Zealand’s electoral reform of the 1990s and offer a comprehensive test of Iversen and Soskice’s concept. We employ the recently developed Bayesian alternative to the synthetic control method and compare the relevant dynamics for New Zealand to those of six majoritarian democracies. Our results largely supports Iversen and Soskice’s claims; due to the lower prevalence of right (center-right) governments, proportional representation democracies tend to redistribute more than majoritarian ones.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42396634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Refugee Labor Market Access Increases Support for Immigration","authors":"Anselm Hager, H. Hilbig, Sascha Riaz","doi":"10.1177/00104140231178733","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231178733","url":null,"abstract":"Does the economic integration of refugees affect public attitudes toward migration? We assess this pertinent question by examining a policy change in Germany, where the government significantly eased labor market access for refugees in the majority of the country. Using administrative employment data, we show that the policy led to a substantial increase in refugee employment, while natives’ wages and employment rates remained unaffected. The policy also had a positive effect on natives’ attitudes toward migration. Voters exposed to more refugees in the labor market were two percentage points more likely to vote for pro-migration parties across both state and federal elections. Additional survey analyses suggest that our results are driven by positive native–refugee interactions in the workplace.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44611348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Voting for Law and Order: Evidence From a Survey Experiment in Mexico","authors":"Tiago Ventura, S. Ley, Francisco Cantú","doi":"10.1177/00104140231169035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231169035","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we examine the demand-and-supply dynamic of security policies. We argue there are two informational shortcuts through which voters process policy alternatives and choose among them: (1) their own personal experiences with violence and (2) candidates’ profiles. We test our argument through an original survey experiment conducted in Mexico. We model voters’ decisions to support candidates campaigning over a variety of security proposals. Our survey design takes advantage of recent developments in network models to better measure the effects of crime exposure on voters’ preferences. We find that higher exposure to crime victimization is associated with increased support for only some iron-fist policies, therefore highlighting the importance of unpacking security policies instead of generalizing the results of crime exposure. We show null effects of partisan advantages and reveal the role of non-partisan heuristics, such as the candidate’s professional experience, in preferences for security policies.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41959327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Personalist Parties Undermine State Capacity in Democracies","authors":"Jia Li, Joseph G Wright","doi":"10.1177/00104140231169014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231169014","url":null,"abstract":"How do political parties shape state capacity? We argue that democratic leaders backed by personalist parties are more likely than other leaders to undermine impartial state administration. Personalist parties are those where the leader has more control over the party than other senior party elites. Elites in these parties have careers closely tied to the leader, are unlikely to normatively value an impersonal bureaucracy, and lack collective action capacity independent from the leader. Therefore, personalist parties are less likely than other parties to restrain leaders from undermining impartial state administration. Results from various designs for causal inference show that party personalism decreases impersonal state administration, particularly when the party controls a legislative majority. However, party personalism does not influence other dimensions of state capacity, such as fiscal capacity or territorial control. The findings have implications for how political parties enable democratically elected leaders to erode open-access societies and ultimately, democracy.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46016179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
D. Dow, Gabrielle Levy, Diego Romero, J. F. Tellez
{"title":"State Absence, Vengeance, and the Logic of Vigilantism in Guatemala","authors":"D. Dow, Gabrielle Levy, Diego Romero, J. F. Tellez","doi":"10.1177/00104140231169026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231169026","url":null,"abstract":"Across the world, citizens sidestep the state to punish offenses on their own. Such vigilantism can help communities provide order, yet it raises concerns about public accountability and the rights of the accused. While prior research has identified the structural correlates of vigilantism, an open question is in which cases citizens prefer vigilantism over conventional policing. To make sense of these preferences, we draw on two logics of punishment: state substitution and retribution. Using survey data from a conjoint experiment presented to over 9000 households across Guatemala, we find that preferences for vigilantism depend on how transgressive the crime is as well as how unlikely it is to be prosecuted by the state. Victim and perpetrator gender, as well as crime severity and profession of the perpetrator, affect whether people endorse vigilante punishment. These results ultimately raise concerns about the viability of \"informal\" forms of policing.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42941019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Activists Who Divide Us: A Cross-Country Analysis of Party Activists’ Influence on Polarization and Representation","authors":"Yair Amitai","doi":"10.1177/00104140231169030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231169030","url":null,"abstract":"What explains party polarization in multiparty systems? This study turns the spotlight to intraparty mechanisms, namely, the authorities and influence of party activists over the candidate selection process, as a potential source of party-system polarization. I hypothesize that parties in which activists possess more comprehensive selection authorities, the party elite will hold more extreme ideological positions, catering to activists' representation demands. Additionally, in such cases, the ideological gap between party elites and voters will be larger since more extreme actors overshadow the preferences of moderate party voters. Aggregating the intraparty effect of activists to the party-system level, I expect to find higher level of party polarization in countries where more parties allocate selection authorities to activists. Utilizing party-level data regarding candidate selection procedures as well as public opinion and elite position data from 19 countries and 93 parties between 2011 and 2017, I find support for my hypotheses.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42292447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}