May 13, 2014 | Elections, Innovative Methodology, International
Post developed by Katie Brown in coordination with Brian Min.
With six weeks of phased voting, 80% of potential voters are expected to cast ballots in India, making it the world’s largest election. Already marked by political posturing and violence, the elections also include the politics of light.
CPS researcher Brian Min developed an innovative way to track energy emissions. Min tracks images from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS). In orbit since 1970, these satellites record high resolution images of light on Earth every night. Min uses these images to track energy consumption over time.
In a recent paper, Min applied this methodology to elections in India. Some of the country remains isolated from a consistent supply of electricity. Using data from 1992 to 2010, Min finds that otherwise dark villages are often illuminated during election cycles. When elections come around, politicians promise light and often deliver power leading up to votes. These areas are then returned to darkness as election promises literally fade from the spotlight.
It remains to be seen if the 2014 election will change power grids. Min will be ready to measure using the satellite images. Look out for future posts about Min’s state-of-the-art research based on the same satellite imaging in other areas.
Apr 23, 2014 | Innovative Methodology, International
Post developed by Katie Brown and Arun Agrawal.
This semester, the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and Arts is sponsoring a theme semester: India in the World. India was selected as a focus for many reasons: its vibrant economy, its middle class is the world’s largest, and its government is the world’s largest democracy. The theme semester seeks to “emphasize the ways that India is a part of everyday life in our increasingly globalized world.”
In this post, we celebrate both the theme semester and yesterday’s Earth Day by featuring the work of Center for Political Studies Faculty Associate and School of Natural Resources and Environment Professor Arun Agrawal. Agrawal studies environmental policy. A recent article in Environmental Science and Policy by Agrawal, Daniel G. Brown, Gautam Rao, Rick Riolo, Derek T. Robinson, and Michael Bommarito focuses on research in India to help us understand how we can use networks to curb resource use.
Research usually focuses on formal institutions as being the difference between successful and unsuccessful resource allocation. But Agrawal and his colleagues argue that institutions are only important in the context of informal networks, or the social interactions between neighbors. Networks are a pervasive part of life. They also change rapidly. But they are little studied in the context of natural resources.
Agrawal and his colleagues examine how institutions and networks interact to influence natural resource use. The authors conducted extensive fieldwork in northern India to investigate how firewood harvesting was influenced by organizations and local social networks. Firewood is critical for cooking food in India so is an important resource to study.
Individual Agents and Social Networks
The authors created the above model to consider changes in behaviors and changes over time. Their focus was on how people make decisions – in particular, on the amount of firewood to harvest from the forest. The changes in these decisions are affected by both institutions and networks.
Based on the results of their modeling work, the authors conclude that effective organizations leverage existing social networks. Specifically, they build on existing norms and interactions to change resource use. If institutions make small investments in changing norms, this can have a disproportionately positive impact in reducing resource use, because network interactions amplify the changes across people. That is, small changes in social networks can translate into large savings in resource use.
Connecting back to the theme semester of India in the World, Agrawal’s research in northern India holds intriguing lessons for how policy making can lead to more sustainable resource use practices: institutional changes should build on local social network effects.
Apr 8, 2014 | Current Events, International, Law
Post developed by Katie Brown in coordination with Yuen Yuen Ang.
The fairness of China’s court system made the news this week. Apple supplier Knowles, which makes microphones and hearing-aid pieces for iPhones, asserted it was blocked from testifying in a trial with a rival of Apple. How can we understand this?
Court cases are on the rise in China, with the number of commercial cases growing steadily, second only to civil disputes. The expansion of courts should mean the rise of the rule of law and a more level playing field for firms, right? Not exactly.
Center for Political Studies (CPS) faculty associate, assistant professor of political science, and Center for Chinese Studies faculty associate Yuen Yuen Ang studies this trend. In a recent article, forthcoming in The Journal of Politics, Ang and Nan Jia find that politically connected firms are actually more likely to use courts than non-connected firms. These connected firms are congressional delegates and/or former party-state officials.
Political connections among private firms in China shape not only their access to resources and profitability, but even their willingness to use courts for dispute resolution.
Number of Court Cases by Type over Time
However, the fact that politically connected firms use courts more may not signal the subversion of law. Besides having access to officeholders (“know who”), politically connected firms also tend to have more knowledge about and confidence in navigating the legal system (“know how”). So do politically connected firms use courts more because of “know who” or “know how?”
By analyzing survey data of over 3,900 private firms in China, Ang and Jia finds that “know who” dominates “know how” in inducing politically connected firms to use courts more.
Findings from the study challenge the assumption in Western-based theories that as law and courts expand, connections will diminish in influence. As the authors write:
“The substitutive view of formal laws and informal networks is premised on the substantial passage of time and absence of a strong authoritarian state in legal development. The edifices of law can be quickly built, but one cannot assume that norms and practices of impartiality will follow, particularly when courts are subordinated to politics by design. In institutional landscapes such as those of China, we can expect a fusion of legality with politics and the informal with the formal.”
Mar 27, 2014 | Innovative Methodology, International, Profile
Post developed by Katie Brown in coordination with Muzammil Hussain.
This post is a special edition of our researcher profile series. We’re very pleased to welcome Muzammil Hussain to the Center for Political Studies (CPS)!
Hussain’s research began in 2005 at University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he completed his Bachelor of Science degree at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Intrigued by political communication research, Hussain sought to take the American orientation of the field into parallel domains. In particular, he turned to Bangalore, India – his hometown. Hussain received a fellowship to study the social contexts and consequences of “new media” in Bangalore internet cafes, covering all types of neighborhoods: slums, religious, separated, and class-based. He also applied a variety of methods to his fieldwork in these diverse contexts.
His research interests intensified at the University of Washington, where he relocated in 2008 to pursue his M.A. and Ph.D. in Communication. Over the last three years, Hussain has shifted his research focus to political systems. In particular, his research asks how technology diffusion is a politicized, transnational project. That is, how the deployment of new internet infrastructure not only shapes the ways people use digital media in political ways, but fundamentally how these new opportunities for participation and mobilization are afforded, structured, and regulated by state powers.
His research has culminated in two book projects. Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring (OUP 2013) compares the Arab Spring in depth in 22 nations. State Power 2.0 (Ashgate 2013) is an edited volume that includes scholars from advanced democratic, authoritarian, and emerging democratic nations.
Through his field research and international stays, Hussain has seen first hand the key role state governments play in the evolution of media systems. In the future, he seeks to bring governmental systems, not just social actors, into the equation of his research. Post-internet democracies, Hussain says, are characterized as increasingly technocratic. Comparative analysis shows both advanced democracies and recalcitrant dictatorships treating public information infrastructure in surprisingly similar ways.
Muzammil Hussain is excited to be a member of both the Department of Communication Studies and the Center for Political Studies. He seeks to root his research in the areas of media studies and political communication, while drawing on the comparative ethos of political studies. These lenses allow a more comprehensive picture of comparative digital politics to emerge. Before relocating to Ann Arbor this January, Hussain completed a fellowship at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (Doha, Qatar) investigating digital activism surrounding the post-Arab Spring electoral politics in Tunisia and Yemen.
Mar 20, 2014 | Current Events, Elections, Innovative Methodology, International
Post developed by Katie Brown in coordination with Kirill Kalinin.
Photo credit: Thinkstock
An earlier post on the Center for Political Studies (CPS) Blog covered Kirill Kalinin’s work concerning election fraud in Russia. That post showed evidence from empirical work that polls ahead of the 2012 Russian presidential election were flawed, setting the stage for subsequent election fraud. This post returns to Kalinin’s work to consider why.
Political Science Ph.D. candidate Kirill Kalinin studies election fraud. Along with Professor of Political Science, Professor of Statistics, and Center for Political Studies Faculty Associate Walter Mebane, Kalinin authored a paper – Understanding Electoral Frauds through Evolution of Russian Federalism: from “Bargaining Loyalty” to “Signaling Loyalty” – arguing that Russia’s election fraud can be understood as rooted in federalism and a formal signaling game model.
Kalinin and Mebane support this argument with empirical analysis. The researchers find that the occurrence of 0s and 5s in the last digit of election turnout percentages to be suspicious. In fact, using statistical modeling, they find it to be linked to election fraud connected with post-election rewards and punishments. From 2000 on, fraud appears to be widespread.
But why? In 2000, Putin came to power and initiated a process of recentralization. From the mid 1990s through the 2000s, regional governors made changes based in rational strategy to Russia’s federal relations.
In the mid-1990s, the central government rewarded governors with political, institutional, and financial resources in exchange for favorable election results. In the 2000s, this escalated to election fraud.
As Kalinin concludes, “Over the most recent election cycles Russian elections have become increasingly unfree and unfair, characterized by suppression of electoral competition, rising levels of administrative interference and drastic growth of electoral frauds.” That is, the rewards for fraud have rendered Russian elections inherently fraudulent.
Mar 5, 2014 | Conflict, Current Events, Foreign Affairs, International
Post developed by Katie Brown in coordination with Muzammil Hussain
Photo credit: Thinkstock
In recent weeks, massive protests have swept through Venezuela and Ukraine. Instagram and Twitter have been featured as playing a key role in the latter. Digital activism is increasingly attributes to helping spark rapid waves of mobilization across several recent international cases.
Center for Political Studies (CPS) faculty associate and assistant professor of communication Muzammil Hussain studies the role of technology in protest. With Philip N. Howard of the University of Washington, Hussain published an article weighing the roles of Internet infrastructure and mobile telephony in the Arab Spring mobilizations.
Though in a different area of the world, understanding the role of communication systems, the political uses of digital media, and the politicization of internet infrastructure in the Arab Spring can help shed light on the current wave of democratization. Hussain argues that information technologies do not cause political change, but they have become a consistent tool and space to afford and act out political contentions.
To understand the relative success of the Arab Spring across different countries in the Middle East and North Africa, the authors look at a variety of contextual factors, including income, wealth distribution, unemployment, demographics, digital connectivity, censorship, and economic dependence on fuel. In the article, they examine the impact of these factors on regime fragility and social movement success. Interestingly, they argue that the inciting incidents in each country were digitally mediated. The describe how digital communication sets off a six-stage process of political mobilization experienced in both successful and failed attempts for regime change.
The authors conclude that “information infrastructure – especially mobile phone use – consistently appears as one of the key ingredients in parsimonious models for the conjoined combinations of causes behind regime fragility and social movement success.” That is, digital communication networks, especially mobile phones, drive political upheaval. In addition to offering insight into the Arab Spring experiences, this may also help explain the recent successful ousting of Ukraine’s president.
