The Strategic Shuffle: Ethnic Geography, the Internal Security Apparatus, and Elections in Kenya

For autocrats facing elections, officers in the internal security apparatus play a crucial role by engaging in coercion on behalf of the incumbent. Yet reliance on these officers introduces a principal‐agent problem: Officers can shirk from the autocrat’s demands. To solve this problem, autocrats strategically post officers to different areas based on an area’s importance to the election and the expected loyalty of an individual officer, which is a function of the officer’s expected benefits from the president winning reelection. Using a data set of 8,000 local security appointments within Kenya in the 1990s, one of the first of its kind for any autocracy, I find that the president’s coethnic officers were sent to, and the opposition’s coethnic officers were kept away from, swing areas. This article demonstrates how state institutions from a country’s previous authoritarian regime can persist despite the introduction of multi‐party elections and thus prevent full democratization.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136510/1/ajps12279_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136510/2/ajps12279.pd

Different paths to the modern state in Europe: the interaction between domestic political economy and interstate competition

Theoretical work on state formation and capacity has focused mostly on early modern Europe and on the experience of western European states during this period. While a number of European states monopolized domestic tax collection and achieved gains in state capacity during the early modern era, for others revenues stagnated or even declined, and these variations motivated alternative hypotheses for determinants of fiscal and state capacity. In this study we test the basic hypotheses in the existing literature making use of the large date set we have compiled for all of the leading states across the continent. We find strong empirical support for two prevailing threads in the literature, arguing respectively that interstate wars and changes in economic structure towards an urbanized economy had positive fiscal impact. Regarding the main point of contention in the theoretical literature, whether it was representative or authoritarian political regimes that facilitated the gains in fiscal capacity, we do not find conclusive evidence that one performed better than the other. Instead, the empirical evidence we have gathered lends supports to the hypothesis that when under pressure of war, the fiscal performance of representative regimes was better in the more urbanized-commercial economies and the fiscal performance of authoritarian regimes was better in rural-agrarian economie

Religious Diversity in America: An Historical Narrative

This brief rethinks the question of American pluralism, indicating the historical moments when diversity came into question, but also to highlight the strategies of managing diversity. In addition to the historical narrative, we present research by experts, special highlighted in-text features with archival materials, websites and resources for teachers, as well a thorough bibliographical tool to help educators present materials to students. We end the document with a section on the contemporary trends in religious pluralism in the United States as questions to probe the interest of students experiencing the ongoing debates and even some of the more detrimental effects of our divisions

Religious Diversity in America: An Historical Narrative

This brief rethinks the question of American pluralism, indicating the historical moments when diversity came into question, but also to highlight the strategies of managing diversity. In addition to the historical narrative, we present research by experts, special highlighted in-text features with archival materials, websites and resources for teachers, as well a thorough bibliographical tool to help educators present materials to students. We end the document with a section on the contemporary trends in religious pluralism in the United States as questions to probe the interest of students experiencing the ongoing debates and even some of the more detrimental effects of our divisions