Interdisciplinary Workshop on Comparative Politics (IWCP)

Distributive Hypocrisy in Authoritarian Regimes: Evidence from Preferential Resource Allocation in China’s COVID-19 testing

Abstract: What is the relationship between terrorism and religious repression? Some argue that terrorism is a byproduct of state repression, especially religious repression, when it comes to Muslim majority countries (MMCs) and Islamist terrorism. Others contend that state repression – including repressive religious regulation – is a rational state strategy for combatting or mitigating terrorism. We ask whether the threat of terrorism is a smoke screen for states to justify increasing religious repression or a rational response to a security threat. We employ multiple empirical tests utilizing new data on religious regulation from three newly independent MMCs that have experienced both exposure to terrorism and increasing levels of religious repression since 1991 – Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Our preliminary conclusion is that religious repression has a life cycle such that even if states may initially be responding to a real or perceived threat of terrorism, it can accelerate for other reasons unrelated to terrorism. 

What is the relationship between the changes in conflict violence and the public’s political participation in democratic processes? More specifically, does a deterioration in militarized violence bring citizens out into the streets and encourage them to get involved in protests, and, alternatively, do military gains/decrease in violence make the public more politically quiescent? This paper pursues four related goals: 1) introduce a unique time series event dataset of political activism–proxied through protests–and a granular assembly of various conflict-related violence activity in Armenia; 2) use the dataset to identify patterns of protest dynamics against the backdrop of ongoing conflict violence; 3) discuss a causal strategy and assumptions made by the estimation model that is sensitive to the granular nature of the data; 4) apply event study design to the data to test the causal linkage between the occurrence of violence and the likelihood of a protest event.  Preliminary findings suggest that the nature and scope of protest activities change in those years when there are prominent changes in conflict violence, however, the sequencing and the causal relationship between conflict and protest occurrence is more tenuous.  By contrast, I found that greater involvement in conflict processes from outside actors precedes a surge in protest activity in a statistically significant way.

Abstract: Across the world, politicians have been winning elections using new forms of campaigning to reach citizens directly, often using emotional rather than policy appeals. Do these forms of campaigning work for programmatic politicians as well? We partner with a mainstream opposition political party to implement a field experiment during the 2019 Philippine Senatorial election to test the effectiveness of: (i) direct in-person appeals providing policy information; (ii) the addition of an activity designed to engender positive emotion. We show that direct engagement providing policy information increases vote share for the party, even in a clientelistic context. Additionally, while the emotional activity increases engagement with the campaign in the short term, the information-only treatment was more effective. Last, we present evidence that the treatments operated through learning and persuasion channels: treated voters were more likely to know the party, more certain about their knowledge, and gave higher ratings to the party’s quality and proposed policies.

Abstract: Does cooperation and prejudice reduction go hand-in-hand as outcomes when fostering intergroup contact? Both academics and policy practitioners explore and promote intergroup contact in diverse populations to reduce prejudice, à la contact theory hypothesis, and also to promote cooperation. Studies have shown that contact can reduce prejudiced attitudes towards the outgroup, but can they bring about costly behavior needed for cooperation? I argue intergroup contact changes prejudiced attitudes and willingness to cooperate with the outgroup through different paths. In a program designed to promote intergroup contact between refugees and Ugandan nationals through farmer groups, I find that while Ugandan nationals in mixed groups (with both refugee and Ugandan national members) are more accepting of refugees as individuals, they are less willing to share resources and cooperate with the out-group, than those in homogeneous groups. To explain this contradictory result, I argue that while contact might reduce prejudice, it might not necessarily improve cooperation. I hypothesize that people in diverse groups get "trapped" in a non-cooperative equilibrium because baseline expectations and strategies of cooperation are mismatched, which likely leads to increased uncertainty. Through vignette experiments, I find that nationals and refugees have mismatched baseline expectations of the outgroup's work effort. While Ugandan nationals have a lower expectation of refugees' work effort contributions compared to co-nationals, refugees have the same expectation for both the ingroup and outgroup. As a result, they play different strategies of cooperation - refugees punish the outgroup more harshly than nationals do, and nationals reward the outgroup less than refugees do.