| 1. |
- Lust, Ellen, 1966, et al.
(författare)
-
Historical Legacies, Social Cleavages, and Support for Political Islam
- 2021
-
Ingår i: The Oxford Handbook of Politics in Muslim Societies. - Oxford : Oxford University Press. - 9780190931056
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Much has been written on political advantages conferred to Islamist parties. These advantages are often viewed as resulting from the parties’ organizational strength, their economic policies, or the expected material benefits they award. The role of religion in motivating Islamist support has been largely underplayed, and even less attention has been given to the various dimensions of Islam. This gap in the research remains conspicuous, as evidence from European, African, and American contexts point to a very real relationship between various facets of religion and electoral patterns. This chapter reviews how historical legacies and social conditions in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt have shaped electoral behavior, including the ways in which organizational, economic, or religious factors are associated with Islamist support. Employing original survey data, it investigates the dominant explanations of electoral support as well as the influence of three religious factors—religious identity, practice, and preferences toward the role of Islam in the state. We find evidence in all three countries that citizens’ preferences for a role of religion in the state is strongly correlated with voting for Islamist parties. In Tunisia, religious practice was also significantly associated with support for Islamists. Religious identity was never significant in our cases, however. Attitudes toward party organization and toward service provision were associated with Islamist support in Tunisia and Libya, respectively. Importantly, religious factors were more consistently related to Islamist support than the organizational, economic, and material incentives that have been given so much attention elsewhere.
|
|
| 2. |
- Kao, Kristen, et al.
(författare)
-
Female Representation and Legitimacy: Evidence from a Harmonized Experiment in Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia
- 2024
-
Ingår i: American Political Science Review. - 0003-0554 .- 1537-5943. ; 118:1
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- How does the gender composition of deliberative committees affect citizens’ evaluations of their decision-making processes? Do citizens perceive decisions made by gender-balanced, legislative bodies as more legitimate than those made by all-male bodies? Extant work on the link between women’s descriptive representation and perceptions of democratic legitimacy in advanced democracies finds the equal presence of women legitimizes decision-making. However, this relationship has not been tested in more patriarchal, less democratic settings. We employ survey experiments in Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia to investigate how citizens respond to gender representation in committees. We find that women’s presence promotes citizens’ perceptions of the legitimacy of committee processes and outcomes and, moreover, that pro-women decisions are associated with higher levels of perceived legitimacy. Thus, this study demonstrates the robustness of findings from the West regarding gender representation and contributes to the burgeoning literature on women and politics.
|
|
| 3. |
- Ferree, Karen, et al.
(författare)
-
Disease Threat, Stereotypes, and Covid–19: An Early View from Malawi and Zambia
- 2020
-
Ingår i: SSRN Electronic Journal. - Göteborg : Göteborgs universitet. - 1556-5068.
-
Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A growing literature documents Covid–19’s health and economic effects. Can Covid–19 also exacerbate identity divisions? Psychologists argue that contagious disease increases threat perception, provoking policing of group boundaries and discrimination against perceived outsiders. We focus here on a mechanism underlying this work, the emergence of disease-based stereotypes. Employing survey experiments administered over the phone in Malawi (N=4,641) and Zambia (N=2,198) in May-August 2020, we explore how insider/outsider status and symptoms of illness shape perceptions of infection, reported willingness to help, and desire to restrict free movement of an ailing neighbor. We find mixed evidence for outsider stereotypes: Malawians associate the disease more with outsiders; Zambians do not. In both countries, moreover, symptoms more strongly shape perceptions and hypothetical behavior than insider/outsider status, suggesting that objective risk matters more than identities in shaping responses to the illness.
|
|
| 4. |
- Benstead, Lindsay, et al.
(författare)
-
Does it matter what observers say? The impact of international election monitoring on legitimacy
- 2022
-
Ingår i: Mediterranean Politics. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1362-9395 .- 1743-9418. ; 27:1, s. 57-78
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Full Article Figures & data References Supplemental Citations Metrics Reprints & Permissions Get access ABSTRACT Scholars and democracy promoters often suggest that electoral observers’ (EOs’) assessments impact public opinion in a straightforward manner, yet, research on communication cautions against these sanguine assumptions. We test the impact of EO statements on public opinion in two very different contexts using survey experiments conducted among 3,361 Jordanians and Tunisians. Our results demonstrate the need for democracy promoters to consider negative consequences when implementing democracy promotion programmes, and for scholars to undertake further research regarding the impacts of election monitoring on domestic attitudes.
|
|
| 5. |
- Benstead, Lindsay, et al.
(författare)
-
Using Tablet Computers to Implement Surveys in Challenging Environments
- 2017
-
Ingår i: Survey Practice. - 2168-0094. ; 10:2
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) has increasingly been used in developing countries, but literature and training on best practices have not kept pace. Drawing on our experiences using CAPI to implement the Local Governance Performance Index (LGPI) in Tunisia and Malawi and an election study in Jordan, this paper makes practical recommendations for mitigating challenges and leveraging CAPI’s benefits to obtain high quality data. CAPI offers several advantages. Tablets facilitate complex skip patterns and randomization of long question batteries and survey experiments, which helps to reduce measurement error. Tablets’ global positioning system (GPS) technology reduces sampling error by locating sampling units and facilitating analysis of neighborhood effects. Immediate data uploading, time-stamps for individual questions, and interview duration capture allowed real time data quality checks and interviewer monitoring. Yet, CAPI entails challenges, including costs of learning new software; questionnaire programming; and piloting to resolve coding bugs; and ethical and logistical considerations, such as electricity and Internet connectivity.
|
|
| 6. |
- Lust, Ellen, 1966
(författare)
-
Everyday Choices: The Role of Competing Authorities and Social Institutions in Politics and Development
- 2022
-
Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Scholars and practitioners seek development solutions through the engineering and strengthening of state institutions. Yet, the state is not the only or the primary arena shaping how citizens, service providers and state officials engage in actions that constitute politics and development. These individuals are members of religious orders, ethnic communities, and other groups that make claims on them, creating incentives that shape their actions. Recognizing how individuals experience these claims and view the choices before them is essential to understanding political processes and development outcomes. This Element establishes a framework elucidating these forces, which is key to knowledge accumulation, designing future research and effective programming. Taking an institutional approach, this Element explains how the salience of arenas of authority associated with various communities and the nature of social institutions within them affect politics and development. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
|
|
| 7. |
- Pellicer, Miquel, et al.
(författare)
-
Poor people’s beliefs and the dynamics of clientelism
- 2021
-
Ingår i: Journal of Theoretical Politics. - : SAGE Publications. - 0951-6298 .- 1460-3667. ; 33:3, s. 300-332
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Why do some poor people engage in clientelism whereas others do not? Why does clientelism sometimes take traditional forms and sometimes more instrumental forms? We propose a formal model of clientelism that addresses these questions focusing primarily on the citizen’s perspective. Citizens choose between supporting broad-based redistribution or engaging in clientelism. Introducing insights from social psychology, we study the interactions between citizen beliefs and values, and their political choices. Clientelism, political inefficacy, and inequality legitimation beliefs reinforce each other leading to multiple equilibria. One of these resembles traditional clientelism, with disempowered clients that legitimize social inequalities. Community connectivity breaks this reinforcement mechanism and leads to another equilibrium where clientelism takes a modern, instrumental, form. The model delivers insights on the role of citizen beliefs for their bargaining power as well as for the persistence and transformation of clientelism. We illustrate the key mechanisms with ethnographic literature on the topic.
|
|
| 8. |
|
|
| 9. |
- Jöst, Prisca, 1991, et al.
(författare)
-
Social ties, clientelism, and the poor’s expectations of future service provision: Receiving more, expecting less?
- 2021
-
Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Are candidates who hand out clientelistic goods at election time less likely to provide services once they take office? This paper examines the poor’s expectations of future service provision by candidates who hand out money and other goods versus those who do not. We hypothesize that the poor’s expectations should depend on the density of social ties. To test this hypothesis, we use hierarchical models to analyse observational data and two conjoint experiments embedded in a unique survey of Kenyans, Malawians, and Zambians. The heavily clustered sampling design allows the investigation of community- and individual-level factors, while the large sample size allows us to focus on a subsample of over 14,000 poor respondents. In socially dense communities, we find that monetary handouts signal the candidate’s ability to provide future services; in less socially dense areas, such handouts appear to be viewed as in lieu of future services. Greater information flows in socially dense communities may help poor voters to monitor candidates and hold them accountable. It is important to consider how communities’ experiences with clientelism affect expectations of service provision. Development practitioners need to understand how social context affects not only the likelihood of vote-buying but also the distributive effects of clientelism.
|
|
| 10. |
- Lust, Ellen, 1966
(författare)
-
We Don’t Need No Education
- 2015
-
Ingår i: 11 November University of Gothenburg.
-
Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Development specialists recognize that supply-side “good governance” mechanisms (e.g., transparency, public sector management, or accountability institutions) drive the quality of service provision (e.g., Acemoglu and Robinson 2013; Brixi et al. forthcoming), but the demand-side story receives less attention. Conventional wisdom claims that citizens demand high quality service provision across all countries and sectors. As a result, differences in the quality of social service provision are attributed to differences in the supply-side factors. This paper challenges this assumption. It argues that citizen demand for service provision differs across countries and sectors, and that this affects the quality of services provided. It demonstrates the importance of the demand-side of social service provision by analyzing the impact of natural resource rents on the quality of health and education service provision. Rents shape citizens’ demands for health and education services differently: While citizens in rentier and non-rentier states both demand high quality health services, those in rentier economies are less likely to need and demand high quality education. This is because citizens in rentier systems can obtain a high standard of living regardless of the quality of education they attain, but like citizens elsewhere, they remain concerned about their health. The paper demonstrates the demand-side story at two levels. First, it uses a cross-regional analysis of national-level health and education outcomes (using standardized mortality rates and per capita disability-adjusted life years (DALY) and TIMSS 2011 math scores for fourth and eighth grade students, respectively), finding that rents have a statistically significant negative effect on education but no discernible effect on health outcomes. Second, it uses student surveys in eight Middle East and North Africa countries to examine differences citizens’ demand for education. It finds that students in the non-rentier countries report less concern over and engagement with education than students in non-rentier countries. The paper makes several important contributions. First, it turns our attention to the importance of taking citizens’ demand for service delivery more seriously. Second, it suggests that policymakers and practitioners must consider much more carefully both supply and demand side forces that lead to variation across sectors and countries. Third, it extends the literature on rentier states. Much work has been done that examines the impact of oil on democratization and state formation (e.g., Ross 2001; Smith 2004; Herb 2005; Dunning 2008; Haber and Menaldo 2011), and on economic growth (e.g., Rodríguez and Sachs 1999; Sachs and Warner 2001; Neumayer 2004; Alexeev and Conrad 2009); few have examined social service provision (e.g., Gylfasson 2001; Bulte et al. 2005), and those that have done so have not taken the demand-side of social service provision into account. References Acemoglu, Daron and James Robinson (2013). Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York, NY: Crown Publishers. Alexeev, Michael and Robert Conrad, Robert (2009). “The Elusive Curse of Oil,” The Review of Economic and Statistics 91(3): 586-598. Brixi, Hana, Ellen Lust, Michael Woolcock, Jumana Alaref, Samira Halabi, Luciana Hebert, Hannah Linnemann, Manal Quota (forthcoming 2015): Trust, Voice, and Incentives: Learning form Local Successes in Service Delivery in the Middle East and North Africa. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Bulte, Erwin H., Richard Damania, and Robert Deacon (2005). “Resource Intensity, Institutions, and Development,” World Development 33(7): 1029-1044. Dunning, Thad (2008): Crude Democracy. Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gylfason, Thorvaldur (2001). “Natural resources, education, and economic development,” European Economic Review 45(4-6): 847-859. Haber, Stephen and Victor Menaldo (2011). “Do Natural Resources Fuel Authoritarianism? A Reappraisal of the Resource Curse,” American Political science Review 105(1): 1-26. Herb, Michael (2005). “No Representation without Taxation? Rents, Development, and Democracy,” Comparative Politics 37(3): 297-316. Neumayer, Eric (2004). “Does the “Resource Curse” hold for Growth in Genuine Income as Well?” World Development 32(10): 1627-1640. Rodríguez, Francisco and Jeffrey Sachs (1999). “Why Do Resource-Abundant Economies Grow More Slowly?” Journal of Economic Growth 4: 277-303. Ross, Michael L. (2001). “Does Oil Hinder Democracy?” World Politics 53(3): 325-361. Sachs, Jeffrey D. and Andrew Warner (2001). “Natural Resources and Economic Development: The curse of natural resources,” European Economic Review 45: 827-838. Smith, Benjamin (2004). “Oil Wealth and Regime Survival in the Developing World, 1960-1999,” American Journal of Political Science 48(2): 232-246.
|
|
