Comparative Political Studies

Publisher:: Sage Publications, Inc.
Publication date:: 2021-08-12

ISBN:: 0010-4140

Issue Number

No. 58-3, March 2025

Latest documents

Redistributing Power: Land Reform, Rural Cooptation, and Grassroots Regime Institutions in Authoritarian Taiwan
Can redistributive policies such as land reform help authoritarian regimes coopt rural societies? Given that land reform has the potential to disrupt preexisting sociopolitical orders, this article highlights an unresolved puzzle of how regimes balance between the objectives of expanding its rural coalitional support through transformative redistribution and stabilizing its political control over rural institutions during land reform. Using a novel dataset of Taiwan’s 1950s rural reforms under the Kuomintang authoritarian regime, I find that stronger redistributive effects facilitated cooptation of new land reform beneficiaries through a key institution – the farmers’ association (FA). However, I also find that the restructuring of rank-and-file FA membership was still subject to meddling by the native landlord class. I thus argue that land reform, while allowing regimes to broaden their rural coalitions through socioeconomic redistribution, can also paradoxically compel regimes to concede power during institutional cooptation.
The Great Global Divider? A Comparison of Urban-Rural Partisan Polarization in Western Democracies
This study is the first to measure urban-rural electoral divides in a way that facilitates comparisons beyond majoritarian democracies of the UK and North America. Based on national election results at the lowest available geographic level in fifteen countries covering roughly five decades, we present a measure for each election and political party, enabling comparisons over time and between countries with different electoral and party systems. We show that long-term increases in urban-rural divides have been most pronounced in the US, the UK, and Canada, but these divides have also emerged in several European multiparty systems in recent decades, largely because of growing smaller parties with predominantly urban or rural support. Overall urban-rural electoral divides remain lower in these systems due to continued presence of mainstream parties with geographically diverse support. Our contribution paves the way for a comparative research agenda on causes and consequences of urban-rural electoral polarization.
Early-Life Origins of Wartime Behaviour: The Irish Potato Famine and Desertion in the American Civil War
How does pre-war trauma impact battlefield behaviour? I study Irish troops in the American Civil War who experienced the Potato Famine over a decade prior. I use birth cohorts, sibling birth order, adult height, and the geography of last names in Ireland to measure famine exposure within the Irish group at the level of individual soldiers. Each strategy indicates that famine exposure increases desertion. Developing and testing observable implications from theory, I show that heightened risk aversion is the most plausible mechanism. Once soldiers are socialized into active combat through collective risk-sharing the famine effect dissipates. This research contributes to our understanding of the causes of contentious behaviour, how the behavioural legacies of atrocities play-out sans partisanship, and the importance of pre-migration experiences.
The Pigmentocracy of Executive Approval
We advance a theory of pigmentocratic executive approval that accounts for both skin color-based group attachments and deviations in skin tone between citizens and leaders. We argue that such deviations will decrease approval most strongly for those lighter in complexion than the incumbent. We further argue that individuals will most strongly punish incumbents for poor economic performance when their skin tone is lighter than the executive’s. To test our theory, we assess the skin tone of dozens of leaders from the Americas, and we couple the resulting measure with mass survey data from the leaders’ countries. Our findings demonstrate that executive approval throughout the Americas replicates patterns of “pigmentocracy”—inequalities and hierarchies that privilege lighter skin tones.
The Energy Transition and Support for the Radical Right: Evidence from the Netherlands
Energy transition policies often have distributional effects that could have electoral consequences. I study this issue in the context of a Dutch policy change that increased taxes on household natural gas consumption and redistributed the revenues as subsidies for renewables. Radical right parties were the only source of political opposition. A Differences-in-Differences (DiD) analysis with panel data from 2007-2020 shows that after the policy change renters with individualized utility bills became 5–6 percentage points more likely to vote for the radical right compared to renters with utilities included in their rents. Renters with individualized utility bills also became relatively less sympathetic towards the Green party and more concerned about price increases but they did not alter their left-right self-placements nor their views on immigration or the European Union. A secondary analysis finds similar effects for individuals (including home-owners) who are energy poor. This suggests an emerging economically rooted political cleavage over energy transition policies.
Pacem in Terris: Are Papal Visits Good News for Human Rights?
We analyze the effect of state visits by the Catholic pope on human rights in the host country to understand how a small theocracy like the Vatican can exert disproportionate political influence in international politics. Our theory of the strategic interaction between the Catholic Church and host governments describes how the pope’s use of conditional approval and criticism incentivizes governments to refrain from human rights violations. Drawing on a new dataset of papal state visits outside Italy and a novel identification strategy, we test for the first time whether governments react in anticipation of a papal visit by improving their human rights protection. Our empirical analysis offers robust evidence for this causal effect, which is supported by qualitative evidence.
How Moral Beliefs Influence Collective Violence. Evidence From Lynching in Mexico
How do moral beliefs influence favorability to collective violence? In this article, I argue that, first, moral beliefs are influential depending on their salience, as harm avoidance is a common moral concern. The more accessible moral beliefs in decision-making, the more they restrain harmful behavior. Second, moral beliefs are influential depending on their content. Group-oriented moral beliefs can overturn the harm avoidance principle and motivate individuals to favor collective violence. Analysis is based on a representative survey in Mexico City and focuses on a proximate form of collective violence, locally called lynching. Findings support both logics of moral influence. Experimentally induced moral salience reduces favorability to lynching, and group-oriented moral beliefs are related to more favorability. Against existing theories that downplay the relevance of morality and present it as cheap talk, these findings demonstrate how moral beliefs can both restrain and motivate collective violence.
The Two-Way Effects of Populism on Affective Polarization
Despite attention in comparativist and Americanist literatures to populism and affective polarization, relatively little theoretical and empirical work has been done linking these two concepts. We present a comprehensive theory arguing that populism leads to greater affective polarization among both populist citizens and non-populist citizens, and that the latter effect grows as populism increases. We test this two-way effect using V-Dem expert rankings of populism and CSES surveys to measure affective polarization for 185 elections in 53 countries. This cross-regional analysis confirms and extends previous claims of a strong correlation between populist party identity and individual-level affective polarization; just as important, it also shows that an individual’s affective polarization is associated with populism at the country level, whether or not that individual is a supporter of populist parties. We show further that these results help explain a common finding in the comparative literature, that radical-right parties in Western democracies are disproportionately the target of animosity from other parties.
Policymakers’ Abortion Preferences: Understanding the Intersection of Gender and Wealth
When are politicians willing to liberalize abortion laws? While restricted access to legal abortion affects millions of women around the world, there is relatively little understanding of the factors shaping the views of politicians who craft or uphold such restrictive laws. This study examines the impact of a public health framing commonly employed by activists to persuade politicians to reform abortion laws. We provide evidence that politicians’ preferences toward abortion reforms are shaped by the intersection of gender and wealth. Drawing on a survey experiment conducted among more than 600 politicians in Zambia, we show that only women politicians from less wealthy backgrounds are more likely to support policy liberalization after being exposed to a public health framing. These findings underscore how economic inequalities can affect the substantive representation of women’s interests and provide a baseline for further research on the use of framing strategies in other developing country contexts.
The Factional Logic of Political Protection in Authoritarian Regimes
Existing literature highlights an authoritarian sanction dilemma: Dictators must deter rent-seeking, yet in doing so they risk antagonizing factional allies. Using a new dataset of disciplinary investigations within the Chinese and Vietnamese Communist Party, I show that some dictators navigate this dilemma by tailoring the political protection they provide to their followers. Factional malleability, the extent to which a regime’s factions are formed around mutable personal connections, moderates the choice of protection method. In China, where factions are rigid, factional allies’ defection threat is non-credible. Thus, the dictator offers ex post protection, which is more desirable to him than to his subordinates, by giving delayed, lenient punishments to investigated officials in factionally-connected provinces. In contrast, under Vietnam’s malleable factions, the dictator provides ex ante protection by excluding the same officials from investigations. The findings illuminate how authoritarian regimes with similar formal institutions produce divergent anti-corruption outcomes.