When authoritarian-era elites return to positions of power under democracy, what are the implications for the quality of democracy? We investigate this question using an original dataset that tracks former authoritarian elites’ capture of high-level posts under democracy across Latin America from 1900 to 2015. We find that when authoritarian-era elites capture a wide range of posts across disparate government branches – spanning the executive, legislature, judiciary, military, and local elected office – such “elite dispersion” undercuts the quality of democracy. It also harms specific dimensions of democracy such as accountability, openness of competition, breadth of inclusion, and egalitarianism. These results are robust to prominent alternative explanations of the quality of democracy, and in particular, explanations that underscore the importance of formal organizations and institutions such as autonomous militaries, dominant political parties, and holdover autocratic constitutions. Elite dispersion matters for the quality of democracy even after controlling for these more visible channels of former authoritarian elite influence.

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What explains sustained mobilization — social movement resilience — in the face of severe autocratic repression? This question is especially relevant given the recent uptick in protest movements across the world. We examine this question through the case of Sudan’s popular uprising, which lasted from December 2018 until the country began a formal transition to democracy in July 2019. Drawing on in-depth field research during and after the uprising, we look at the role of organizational legitimacy, elite unity, and the evolution of repression evasion tactics. We find that the movement’s organizational form and mobilization tactics coevolved with the actions of the security apparatus. 

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Kristen Looney will be discussing her forthcoming work, Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia (Cornell U. Press 2020). This book tackles the question of how countries achieve rural development and offers a new way of thinking about East Asia’s political economy that challenges the developmental state paradigm. Through a comparison of Taiwan (1950s–1970s), South Korea (1950s–1970s), and China (1980s–2000s), the research shows that different types of development outcomes—improvements in agricultural production, rural living standards, and the village environment—were realized to different degrees, at different times, and in different ways. Looney argues that rural modernization campaigns played a central role in the region and that divergent development outcomes can be attributed to the interplay between campaigns and institutions. Relevant to political science, economic history, rural sociology, and Asian studies, the book enriches our understanding of state-led development and agrarian change.

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In the face of mounting challenges from criminal activity and citizen demands for improved public safety, Mexico has undertaken significant efforts at police reform. Those efforts would presumably enhance the capacity of police forces to fight and deter crime. This paper explores the quantity and quality of police in Mexico, a federation where multi-tier government makes incentives for police professionalization more challenging than in unitary systems. The paper calculates, the true size of police forces, comparing them to all legal specialists in the use of violence, including private security guards at homes and businesses. It then estimates the implicit wage incentives given to experience and human capital formation in the different types of police corporations during the Calderón and Peña Nieto presidential administrations. Finally, we use a municipal cross section to gain further insight into the effects of police professionalization on interpersonal violence, as measured by homicide rates. The overall findings suggest that improving policing in Mexico is not merely a question of adding manpower or spending more budgetary resources, but of changing career incentives for greater professionalization.

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Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/i-Oaa0yiSjA

About this Event: In the last 50 years, the United States and Soviet Union/Russia have pursued arms control negotiations and signed numerous treaties in an effort to restrain and reduce the number and capabilities of their nuclear weapons. However, the recent collapse of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the possible expiration of the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in 2021 may signal the end to treaty-based limits. This raises questions about the future form and content of bilateral nuclear arms control. While near-term questions focus on whether the United States and Russia can salvage the benefits of these two treaties and, possibly, expand them to include more types of weapons and additional countries, longer-term questions are less specific. Does the past bilateral arms control process represent more than just an effort to negotiate legally binding treaties that limit or reduce nuclear weapons? Can the United States and Russia pursue agreements and cooperate in reducing weapons if they cannot conclude the process by signing formal agreements? Can they maintain stability, exhibit restraint, and reduce the risk of war if the era of arms control treaties has ended? Can this new era of arms control expand to address concerns about new types of weapons and the risks posed by a greater number of countries?

Speaker's Biography: Amy F. Woolf is a Specialist in Nuclear Weapons Policy in the Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division of the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress.  She provides Congress with information and expert analysis on issues related to U.S. and Russian nuclear forces and arms control. She has authored many studies on these issues and has spoken often, outside Capitol Hill, about Congressional views on arms control and U.S. nuclear weapons policy. Ms. Woolf received a Masters in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a BA in Political Science from Stanford University.

Livestream: This event will not be live-streamed or recorded.

Abstract: When U.S. Senator Arthur Vandenberg famously told President Harry Truman that he’d have to “scare the hell out of the American people” to secure support for the coming Cold War, Vandenburg was tapping into a tried and true tradition of strategically cultivating fear to influence attitudes and change behavior. While this tactic has a long history of use, strikingly little has been written on precisely how, why, and when it actually works. In this talk, Professor Kelly M. Greenhill offers just such an explanation. Drawing upon findings from her next book, Fear and Present Danger: Extra-factual Sources of Threat Conception and Proliferation, Greenhill describes how and why cognitive and psychological biases can be triggered and strategically manipulated as means to political and military ends.

Greenhill further explains why actors engaged in this particular kind of cognitive hacking frequently eschew fact-based arguments in favor of “truthier” alternatives, such as rumors, conspiracy theories, propaganda, fiction and so-called fake news, sources she collectively refer to as “extra-factual information” (EFI). She identifies the conditions under which policymakers and the public tend to find EFI-infused threat narratives persuasive, and, drawing upon a wide array of historical examples, show that while information content and delivery platforms have changed, the underlying mechanisms that make this tool such an effective instrument of political influence, and EFI, such a useful handmaiden to it, have not. Greenhill highlights the implications of historical cases for our contemporary, EFI-saturated political environment and what current trends may portend for the future.

Speaker’s Biography: Kelly M. Greenhill (PhD, MIT) is a professor and Director of International Relations at Tufts University and Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. Greenhill has published four books, including Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy (winner of ISA’s Best Book of the Year Award); Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict; The Use of Force: Military Power and International Politics; and Coercion: The Power to Hurt in International Politics. Outside of academia, Greenhill has consulted for the US government, UN, UNHCR, World Bank and Ford Foundation and worked as an analyst for the U.S. Defense Department. 

Seminar Recording: ​https://youtu.be/vwmgYCTUJ3o

About this Event: Scholars and practitioners have long argued that compliance with international rules often requires building institutions or other mechanisms to ease access to information about possible violations. This book introduces a different information problem -- disclosure dilemmas -- that requires equipping IOs with secrecy. States and firms often possess private information that sheds detailed light on the compliance of others with international rules. Yet fears of revealing intelligence sources or helping commercial rivals can deter them from disclosing it. Building a “confidentiality system” in an international organization can allow the institution to receive and protect such sensitive details, enabling disclosure without wider dissemination. This, in turn, elicits the sharing of unique and sensitive information which fills evidentiary gaps and makes cooperation more effective. For example, targeted intelligence disclosures to the IAEA can fill in gaps about hidden nuclear weapons programs. Similarly, targeted disclosures of internal firm documentation to the WTO can clarify whether trade barriers have caused damage to foreign firms. The book offers a unified, multi-method approach to understanding international cooperation and how institutions work, spanning economic and security domains from nuclear proliferation to trade to human rights. In addition to practical lessons about how to improve compliance with international rules, the book recasts the role of institutions in International Relations and identifies a source of tension between cooperation and normative goals like global governance transparency.

Speaker's Biography: Austin Carson is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His first book, Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics (Princeton UP 2018), argues that secrecy helps great powers meddle in conflicts while keeping war limited. It was recently award the Lepgold Book Prize for best book in 2018. A second book with Allison Carnegie, Secrets in Global Governance: Disclosure Dilemmas and the Challenge of International Cooperation (Cambridge UP forthcoming), shows how secrecy allows international organizations to use sensitive information to assess compliance. His research has appeared in International Organization, American Journal of Political Science, and Security Studies.

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/HFZJj01vC3U

Abstract: By most accounts, the most important political space in the world's largest country is the four inches between Vladimir Putin’s ears. In a new book, Graeme Robertson and Sam Greene challenge the idea that Putin has shaped Russia in his own image, arguing instead that it his power flows from a particular relationship he has developed with his citizens -- and that his citizens have developed with one another. The result is a view of Russian politics as something much more fluid and fragile than we generally understand, a shifting landscape in which Putin's power -- and that of whoever succeeds him -- is continually negotiated and renegotiated between the Kremlin and the public, even in the confines of an increasingly authoritarian state. In this discussion, Greene and Robertson explore the social and political imperatives, challenges and dilemmas Putin and Russia face as he rounds out his fourth term and wonders about a fifth.

Speakers' Biography:

Sam Greene is reader in Russian politics and Director of the Russia Institute at King's College London. His research focuses on the relationships between citizens and the state in Russia, and in societies experiencing social, economic and political transformation more broadly. His first book, Moscow in Movement: Power and Opposition in Putin's Russia, was published by Stanford University Press in 2014. More recently, he is co-author with Graeme Robertson of Putin v the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia, published by Yale University Press in 2019. He also serves as Associate Fellow in the Russian and Eurasian Programme of the International Institute for Security Studies and a Visiting Professor at the UK Defence Academy.

Graeme Robertson is a Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Director of the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies. His work focuses on political protest and regime support in authoritarian regimes.

Graeme’s new book (with Samuel A. Greene) is Putin v. The People, published by Yale University Press in June 2019. The book presents a fresh new look at the social bases of support for and opposition to authoritarian rule in Russia. Graeme is also the author of Revolution and Reform in Ukraine, published by PONARS Eurasia (with Silviya Nitsova and Grigore Pop-Eleches) and The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes: Managing Dissent in Post-Communist Russia, published by Cambridge University Press. He has published articles in many academic journals including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics and the British Journal of Political Science, as well as contributing regularly to the media on Russia and Ukraine. Graeme currently serves as the Associate Editor for Comparative Politics for the American Journal of Political Science.

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/5c8Un2Y9-sw

Abstract: Over the last fifteen years, the Russian government has invested significantly in improving Russia’s education and health care systems and in reversing the health and demographic catastrophes of the 1990s. This discussion will assess the extent to which those investments have paid off and the continued challenges Putin faces in aligning Russia’s human capital resources with his political, economic, and foreign policy ambitions. It will also examine the ways that health and social policy have been used as political tools – not always successfully – by the Putin regime.

Speaker Biography: Judy Twigg is a professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University; senior associate (non-resident) with the Center for Strategic and International Studies; consultant for the evaluation units of the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank; and adjunct professor at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. Twigg’s work focuses on issues of health, human capital, and health systems reform in Eurasia, as well as evaluations of human development and public sector management assistance projects globally. She has been a consultant for John Snow, Inc., UNICEF, USAID, the Eurasia Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Twigg was a 2005 recipient of the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award. She holds a B.S. in physics from Carnegie Mellon University, an M.A. in political science and Soviet studies from the University of Pittsburgh, and a Ph.D. in political science and security studies from MIT.