Oct 28, 2014 | Foreign Affairs, Innovative Methodology, International
Post developed by Katie Brown in coordination with Khalil Shikaki.
Can measurement promote democratization in the Arab world? Khalil Shikaki, visiting scholar at the Center for Political Studies (CPS), believes the answer is “yes.” In 2006, he set out to create an instrument to measure both the direction and sustainability of the transitional process. The resulting Arab Democracy Index is a joint project between the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), the Arab Reform Initiative, and the Arab Barometer.
The Arab Democracy Index is unique in that it comes from within the Arab world to reflect local experiences. It also pulls from three main sources: data on government actions, reviews of legal and constitutional text, and public opinion data. Local teams in nine to twelve countries collect this data, tailoring the standardized process based on their local expertise. Together, these sources offer insight into 40 indicators of democracy.
The Arab Democracy Index indicators break down into two types. First, there are Means, e.g., legislation, which speak to democracy de jure. Second, there are Practices, e.g., elections, which speak to democracy de facto. Data in each category tally to a total. Scores below 400 constitute an undemocratic state, 400 to 699 indicate early signs of transition, 700 to 1,000 highlight visible progress toward democracy, and scores above 1,000 pertain to already democratic nations. The graph below displays the results for all Arab countries. Overall, Means remain relatively constant while Practices show signs of improvement.
The data can also be broken down by country, as in the graph below. As we can see, some nations are driving this positive trend while others are moving away from democracy during this period.
The results led to reports, issued in 2008, 2009, and 2010, that not only document opinion but offer policy recommendations for policy change tailored to each country. Shikaki notes that while political and civil rights have improved, more must be done. Specifically, he recommends a focus on reforming education, social justice, and socio-economic reforms. The Arab Democracy Index also underscores an important larger point: external pressure from the U.S. Department of State can help change democracy in theory, but change in practice must come from within.
Oct 21, 2014 | Conflict, Innovative Methodology, International
Post developed by Katie Brown and Christian Davenport.
Who did what to whom in 1994 Rwanda? This is the central question driving the GenoDynamics project directed by Center for Political Studies Faculty Associate and Professor of Political Science, Christian Davenport, and former CPS affiliate and current Dean of the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, Allan Stam.
Last week, Davenport updated the associated website to provide new, unreleased data that the project collected, documents that can no longer be found on the topic, and new visualizations and animations of collected data.
Also added to the website was a page specifically dedicated to a recent BBC documentary, Rwanda’s Untold Story, that features the research. The documentary premiered on October 1, 2014 in Europe and is now available for viewing on the Internet. The film itself has prompted some controversy. The most vocal critics call those involved with the documentary “genocide deniers,” which by Rwanda law classifies as anyone who completely denies or seeks to “trivialize” or reduce the number of Tutsi victims declared by the government. Others have protested outside the BBC headquarters in London. Still others have praised the film for bringing forward a story that they felt was long overdue.
The GenoDynamics website features all of this criticism. But it also offers a glimpse into what the researchers found and how they found it.
Davenport and Stam knew that Rwanda 1994 was a time of wide-spread violence when they began investigating in depth in 2000. But they did not know “who was engaged in what activity at what time and at what place.” With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the researchers content analyzed and compiled data from the Rwandan government, the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR), Human Rights Watch, African Rights, and Ibuka. These sources were used to create a Bayes estimation of the number of people killed in each commune of the country for the 100 days of the genocide, civil war, reprisal killings and random violence. Davenport and Stam interviewed victims and survivors as well as perpetrators in Rwanda, and they surveyed citizens in the town of Butare. Finally, through a triangulation of information from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a Canadian Military Satellite image, and Hutu and Tutsi military informants through the ICTR, they created variables concerning troop movement and zone of control. This allowed them to see who was responsible for killings in the different locations.
The work is controversial in many respects – including the degree of transparency involved, as Davenport and Stam are the only project that has made all relevant data publicly available – but the biggest controversy concerns how they challenge popular understanding. At present, the official story is that one million people were killed by the extremist Hutu government and the militias associated with them, with most of (and in some stories all of) the victims being Tutsi (upwards of 800,000 in some estimations). But Davenport and Stam found that in 1991 (according to the Rwandan census as well as from population projections back from the 1950s) only 500,000 Tutsis lived in Rwanda. Davenport and Stam further concluded that approximately 200,000 Tutsis were killed, as it was reported by a survivors organization that 300,000 Tutsi survived. While this number is less than the official number, it still represents the partial annihilation of the Tutsi population, which includes genocide but likely other crimes against humanity and human rights violations as well. But the estimation also changes the official story: the results of this research suggest that the majority of those killed in 1994 were in fact Hutu.
After 14 years of research, Davenport and Stam believe that there were several types of political violence occurring in Rwanda in 1994. The table below summarizes the different types of violence that were potentially involved (by perpetrator and victim). The larger project is trying to sort Rwandan political violence into each cell, which is incredibly difficult but useful for understanding exactly what happened.
The current controversy is not a new one. When Davenport and Stam presented their findings to the Rwandan government, they were told that they would not be welcome to return. When they presented their findings at the 10th and 15th anniversaries, they received more criticism. At no point was any new evidence or data provided which countered their narrative. In addition to the documentary, Davenport and Stam are working on a peer reviewed journal article and a book for a broader audience.
Oct 17, 2014 | Elections, International, Uncategorized
Post developed by David Howell and André Blais.
The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project recently celebrated its 20th anniversary during a Plenary Session of collaborators in Berlin, Germany, with thanks to the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB) for their generous organizational and financial support of the event.
At the event, 31 election studies from around the world made presentations about their research designs, plans, challenges, and data availability, with most of their slide sets being available for viewing at the Plenary Session website.
It was especially appropriate to return to Berlin this year, the city having hosted the initial planning meeting for the project 20 years previously. The original event was sponsored by the International Committee for Research into Elections and Representative Democracy (ICORE). Originally anticipated as an outgrowth of ICORE, the CSES grew and eventually replaced it.
A CSES module consists of a 10-15 minute questionnaire that is inserted into post-election surveys from around the world. The project includes collaborators from more than 60 countries, with 50 election studies from 41 countries having appeared in the CSES Module 3 dataset. The CSES design is such that each module has a different theme which is intended to address a new “big question” in science. The project combines all of these surveys for each module, along with macro data about each country’s electoral system and context, into a single dataset for comparative analysis. There is no cost to download the data, and there is no embargo or preferential access. Every citizen in the world is able to download the data from the project’s website at the very same time as any of the project’s collaborators.
The recent Berlin meeting involved the first public presentation and discussion of content proposals submitted for CSES Module 5, for which data collection will be conducted during 2016-2021. After a public call, 20 proposals in total were received – a record number. Interested persons can view a presentation about the proposals, on topics ranging from corruption to populism to personality traits to electoral integrity. The theme for Module 5 will be selected, and the questionnaire developed and pretested, over the next one-and-a-half years. Prior modules have had as their themes: the performance of democracy, accountability and representation, political choices, and distributional politics and social protection.
As of the Berlin meeting in 2014, André Blais and the CSES Module 4 Planning Committee have handed over their role to a new CSES Module 5 Planning Committee, with John Aldrich as chair. John is an outstanding scholar who, in addition to having held leadership positions in many professional associations, has a long association with both the American National Election Studies and CSES.
While at its core CSES is a data gathering and disseminating organization, it has produced many other benefits as well. CSES considers an important part of its mission to be to create a community for electoral researchers, and to encourage election studies and local research capacity building around the world. CSES enables scholarship not just in political science, but other related disciplines – over 700 entries now appear in the CSES Bibliography on the project website.
The majority of funds for the CSES project are provided by the many organizations that fund the participating post-election studies. The central operations of the project are supported by the American National Science Foundation and the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.
We’d like to thank our many collaborators, funding organizations, and users for their support of the CSES, and we look forward to developing an engaging CSES Module 5!
Oct 7, 2014 | Innovative Methodology, International, Social Policy
Post developed by Katie Brown and Ugo Troiano.
Photo credit: ThinkStock
Around the globe, the average maternity leave is 118 days, but with a lot of variation. Maternity leave periods range from 45 days in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates to 480 days in Sweden. Why the difference? And, moreover, does the variation relate to gender discrimination?
Assistant Professor of Economics and Center for Political Studies (CPS) faculty associate Ugo Troiano, along with Yehonatan Givati of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Law School, investigated these questions and published their results in an article in The Journal of Law and Economics.
Their core theory is simple: maternity leave is costly to employers, so when the government mandates long periods of maternity leave, women may be discriminated against and receive lower wages as a result. However, places with a low tolerance for pay gaps won’t let that happen, and the incidence of this policy ends up being shared across genders. As a consequence, it becomes more economically “optimal” to enact longer mandatory maternity leaves in societies that are not discriminatory toward women. This theory is consistent with the empirical evidence.
The authors show that maternity leave is indeed shorter in societies where survey respondents think that men should receive preferential treatment in the workplace. The authors measure this attitude through a World Values Study question that asks level of agreement with, “When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women.” Aggregated to the national level and combined with data on the length of maternity leaves, they find the two are related.
However, that evidence alone does not allow us to conclude that culture is causing a longer leave, because it’s possible that causation goes in the opposite direction: a longer leave is causing more tolerant attitudes toward women. In order to alleviate this concern, Givati and Troiano looked at a proxy from attitudes less likely to change because of maternity leave: language. Specifically, they developed a measure from recent research in psychology and linguistics known as linguistic relativity suggesting that language shapes thought. Following from this, they analyzed the number of gender-differentiated pronouns across languages to see if this corresponded to tolerance of gender discrimination. For example, English uses one gender-differentiated pronoun associated with gender and the number of people referenced, while Spanish uses three (see the table below). In all, Troiano and Givati tallied the number of gender-differentiated pronouns in 33 languages using grammar books, and they looked to see whether the number of pronouns was negatively correlated with gender tolerant attitudes.
The authors indeed find a connection, with more gendered pronouns correlated with greater tolerance of gender discrimination as measured by the World Values Survey question. Next, the authors estimated a regression model, with length of maternity leave as the dependent variable and number of gendered pronouns as the independent variable. Troiano and Givati find that the more gendered pronouns, the shorter the maternity leave. Or, on the flip side, the fewer gendered pronouns, the longer the maternity leave.
Troiano concludes, “This project is an example of how concepts from different social sciences can be used to answer specific policy questions. To understand the factors that affect the variation of maternity leave across countries we integrated economic concepts (incidence of a policy), sociological ones (measuring attitudes from survey) and linguistic ones.”
Sep 18, 2014 | Foreign Affairs, International, Profile
Post developed by Katie Brown and Nahomi Ichino.
This post is a special edition of our researcher profile series. We’re very pleased to welcome Nahomi Ichino to the Center for Political Studies (CPS)!
Ethnic politics and voter behavior in developing countries have long fascinated Nahomi Ichino. She partly attributes this to the relative homogeneity of Japan. The idea that people could be divided across many different ethnic groups and that this could be a major impediment for people to work together to make decisions for society as a whole seemed foreign and therefore intriguing to Ichino. News coverage of the 1983-1985 famine in Ethiopia sparked her interest in developing countries and Africa in particular.
As an undergraduate at Yale University, Ichino took a class on economic development in Africa with Christopher Udry. The course focused on how individuals in poor societies coped with risk and the lack of information as they made economic decisions like saving, borrowing, and lending money, or investing in the education of male and female children. Even as Ichino went onto study more macro-level political topics like political parties, she kept an interest in how individuals made political decisions in these environments.
After graduation with a degree in political science, Ichino continued to study this topic through graduate school, earning a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University in 2008. She then joined the faculty at Harvard University’s Department of Government. Ichino continued to focus on sub-Saharan Africa during her time at Harvard, where she considered ethnic politics and voter behavior in developing democracies. With support from the National Science Foundation, she conducted research in Ghana, and produced a number of articles. Ichino has also conducted fieldwork in Uganda, Nigeria, Benin, Malawi, and Zambia. She also writes on methodological issues. Her work has been featured in the American Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science, among others.
Sep 10, 2014 | Conflict, Current Events, Elections, Foreign Affairs, International
Post developed by Katie Brown in coordination with Khalil Shikaki and Mark Tessler.
Photo credit: ThinkStock
This summer witnessed intense fighting between Israel and Gaza. With tens of thousands of rockets fired, the conflict killed more than 2,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and 80 Israelis, mostly soldiers. How has the most recent conflict affected Palestinian attitudes?
The Palestinian Center for Policy and Research (PCPSR) conducted a survey to gauge this impact. PCPSR is run by Khalil Shikaki. This year, Shikaki is a visiting scholar at the Center for Political Studies (CPS), working closely with CPS Research Professor and expert on the Middle East Mark Tessler. In this post, we offer results from PCPSR’s study along with insight from Tessler to understand the impact of the conflict on Palestinian public opinion.
PCPSR surveyed 1,270 adults in 127 locations across the West Bank and Gaza Strip between August 26 and August 30, 2014, coinciding with the first lasting ceasefire of the conflict. Results suggest that a significant majority (79%) of the Palestinian public views Hamas as the conflict’s winner. Just 3% believe Israel emerged victorious, while 17% believe both sides lost. Likewise, 79% blame Israel for starting this wave of fighting, while 86% support launching rockets at Israel from Gaza when under attack. As for the ceasefire agreement: 63% think it satisfies Palestinian interests.
Photo credit: ThinkStock
In addition to these conflict-specific findings, the PCPSR study also finds increasing support for Hamas among Palestinians to levels not seen since 2006. If elections occurred today, current Hamas deputy political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh would easily win a presidential race against current president Mahoud Abbas. This is a massive shift in public opinion. Tessler notes that before the most recent conflict, support for Hamas was fading. Shikaki attributes this gain to the conflict, while predicting the Hamas support may wane as time passes. Tessler likewise cautions, “If things do settle down for a reasonable period and there is a new and stable status quo, any spike in Hamas popularity will probably drift back toward its ‘normal’ level based on what people favor and perceive with respect to political Islam, compromise with Israel, corruption and other issues that drive Palestinian politics in normal times.” Thus, the lingering effects of the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict will depend on whether or not the ceasefire continues.
Khalil Shikaki will give a talk at the CPS Interdisciplinary Workshop on Politics and Policy on September 17, 2014 in Room 6006 of the Institute for Social Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
