1,720,973 research outputs found
Electoral Security and Legislator Attention: Evidence from the Kenyan National Assembly Debates, 2008-2017
Full text linkHow do African legislators divide their attention between the demands of their local constituency and their responsibilities in national parliament? Majority of studies portrays African legislators as mere rubber-stamping constituency servants. I show instead significant variation in legislator attention. Building on the literature on the electoral origins of legislator behavior, I argue that electoral pressure faced by individual legislators heavily conditions their decisions about how to allocate effort between local and national priorities. Using a novel dataset of more than 56,000 speeches made by over 400 unique legislators in the Kenyan National Assembly from 2008 to 2017, I develop speech-based measures of local versus national attention. I show that Kenyan legislators in less competitive constituencies speak more in national parliament, suggesting a greater commitment to national policymaking. Moreover, when I disaggregate data by type of speech, I find that electorally vulnerable legislators engage in locally oriented speeches, whereas those with security speak more about national topics. Speech data thus reveals an interesting tension within democratizing countries: greater democracy on one dimension – contestation – may ironically create barriers to increasing democracy on a different dimension – horizontal accountability
North Korean Elites and Regime Policy Preference: Analyzing Newspaper and Elite Career Path Data
No full textEconomic Perception to Political Performance Evaluation: Establishing Precursors to Economic Voting in Africa
No full textEmpirical support for economic voting is well documented in advanced democracies. We know less, however, about the extent and dynamics of economic voting in the developing democracies of sub-Saharan Africa. The relationship between economic perceptions and incumbent performance evaluations is a critical precursor to vote choice. I evaluate this link using more than fifty-five thousand individual-level observations across sixteen sub-Saharan African countries. I find that there exists a strong association between economic perception and performance evaluation while controlling for a host of covariates, including ethnicity, partisanship, information, and public goods provision. Contrary to previous findings, however, I show that the influence of economic perception is stronger than many other factors considered in the models such as coethnicity with the incumbent. Moreover, my findings indicate that coethnicity-but not copartisanship-conditions the influence of economic perception on performance evaluation. I use an instrumental variables approach to further validate the findings.1
African Perceptions of Chinese Aid Projects: Evidence from Individual- and Project-level Geocoded Data
No full textDisasters and intergroup peace in sub-Saharan Africa
No full textHow do disasters affect intergroup peace and conflict? Existing research shows that disasters can have opposing effects on how we perceive others: they can exacerbate existing tension in some cases or serve as catalysts for peace and cooperation in others. Yet we know little about the conditions under which we should expect one or the other. In this study, we estimate the impact of disasters on perceptions of out-groups. We combine a dataset of mass disasters with tens of thousands of individual-level survey responses recorded in Round 6 of the Afrobarometer data between 2014 and 2015. Using a difference-in-differences approach exploiting spatial and temporal proximity to disaster occurrences, we estimate the degree to which disasters affect public opinion toward out-groups. As disaster occurrence is plausibly exogenous to interview dates or respondent locations, our approach allows for an improved test of how the shock from disaster can impact public perceptions. Moreover, we show such impact varies by considering the differences in political salience of out-group identities and short- versus long-term differences in the impact on group dynamics. The implications of our findings for understanding the aftermath of past disasters and effects of future disasters on intergroup peace and conflict are discussed.1
The Identical Attribute Value Assignment Problem in Conjoint Experiment
No full textIn this paper, we report a novel problem in conjoint experiment with the assignment of identical attribute values in a task. Similar to the relationship between intention-to-treat estimate (ITT) and the complier average causal effect (CACE) or local average treatment effect (LATE), AMCE is calculated as AMCE from heterogeneous attribute assignments (AMCE) multiplied by the share of heterogeneous attribute assignments. In othere words, AMCE is computed not directly from the full sample but indirectly from a "complier" subpopulation who receive heterogeneous attributes. By construction, AMCE considers those who receive identical attributes as (one-sided) noncomliers.
Ethnicity is not public service destiny: The political logic of service distribution in South Africa
No full textMillions of South Africans in thousands of demonstrations have protested the unequal allocation of public services. Despite the African National Congress’s promise to reduce the disparities generated by apartheid, the level of public services remains highly uneven across the country. Most studies of service provision in Africa assume that politicians will target their co-ethnics; other ‘diversity deficit’ literature hypothesizes that a high level of ethnic diversity undermines service provision from the start. Rather than assuming that ethnicity underlies service distribution in Africa, we argue that explanations of service provision should first examine how political institutions incentivize politicians to choose what services to distribute and how to distribute them. Even in an ethnicized polity, ethnic targeting may not be a politician’s best strategy. We seek to explain the variation in service levels across South African municipalities and advance three hypotheses: (1) Municipal councillors in more ethnically diverse municipalities will form policy coalitions that produce higher service levels. (2) Due to their extensive powers and the possibility of being residual claimants to municipality resources, South African mayors will decrease services when they enjoy electoral safety. (3) The strategic interaction between councillors and their mayor helps to account for the variation in service provision across South Africa’s municipalities. We test our hypotheses with data from more than 1.37 million households and aggregated municipality-level measures and find strong support for all three hypotheses. Political institutions—not ethnic demography—drive policy choices and service outcomes
Rally Around Which Flag?: Investigation of the Impact of Sanctions on the Rally Around the Flag Effects Using Focused Group Discussion with North Korean Defectors
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