The need to promote behaviour change at the cultural level: one factor explaining the limited impact of the MEMA kwa Vijana adolescent sexual health intervention in rural Tanzania. A process evaluation

Background - Few of the many behavioral sexual health interventions in Africa have been rigorously evaluated. Where biological outcomes have been measured, improvements have rarely been found. One of the most rigorous trials was of the multi-component MEMA kwa Vijana adolescent sexual health programme, which showed improvements in knowledge and reported attitudes and behaviour, but none in biological outcomes. This paper attempts to explain these outcomes by reviewing the process evaluation findings, particularly in terms of contextual factors. Methods - A large-scale, primarily qualitative process evaluation based mainly on participant observation identified the principal contextual barriers and facilitators of behavioural change. Results - The contextual barriers involved four interrelated socio-structural factors: culture (i.e. shared practices and systems of belief), economic circumstances, social status, and gender. At an individual level they appeared to operate through the constructs of the theories underlying MEMA kwa Vijana - Social Cognitive Theory and the Theory of Reasoned Action – but the intervention was unable to substantially modify these individual-level constructs, apart from knowledge. Conclusion - The process evaluation suggests that one important reason for this failure is that the intervention did not operate sufficiently at a structural level, particularly in regard to culture. Recently most structural interventions have focused on gender or/and economics. Complementing these with a cultural approach could address the belief systems that justify and perpetuate gender and economic inequalities, as well as other barriers to behaviour change

Information Revolutions and the Overthrow of Autocratic Regimes

This paper presents a model of information quality and political regime change. If enough citizens act against a regime, it is overthrown. Citizens are imperfectly informed about how hard this will be and the regime can, at a cost, engage in propaganda so that at face-value it seems hard. The citizens are rational and evaluate their information knowing the regime's incentives. The model makes three predictions. First, even rational citizens may not correctly infer the amount of manipulation. Second, as the intrinsic quality of information available becomes sufficiently high, the regime is more likely to survive. Third, the regime benefits from ambiguity about the amount of manipulation, and consequently, as it becomes cheaper to manipulate, the regime is also more likely to survive. Key results of the benchmark static model extend to a simple dynamic setting where there are waves of unrest

Non-Disruptive Tactics of Suppression Are Superior in Countering Terrorism, Insurgency, and Financial Panics

BACKGROUND: Suppressing damaging aggregate behaviors such as insurgency, terrorism, and financial panics are important tasks of the state. Each outcome of these aggregate behaviors is an emergent property of a system in which each individual's action depends on a subset of others' actions, given by each individual's network of interactions. Yet there are few explicit comparisons of strategies for suppression, and none that fully incorporate the interdependence of individual behavior. METHODS AND FINDINGS: Here I show that suppression tactics that do not require the removal of individuals from networks of interactions are nearly always more effective than those that do. I find using simulation analysis of a general model of interdependent behavior that the degree to which such less disruptive suppression tactics are superior to more disruptive ones increases in the propensity of individuals to engage in the behavior in question. CONCLUSIONS: Thus, hearts-and-minds approaches are generally more effective than force in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, and partial insurance is usually a better tactic than gag rules in quelling financial panics. Differences between suppression tactics are greater when individual incentives to support terrorist or insurgent groups, or susceptibilities to financial panic, are higher. These conclusions have utility for policy-makers seeking to end bloody conflicts and prevent financial panics. As the model also applies to mass protest, its conclusions provide insight as well into the likely effects of different suppression strategies undertaken by authoritarian regimes seeking to hold on to power in the face of mass movements seeking to end them

Overthrowing the dictator: a game-theoretic approach to revolutions and media

A distinctive feature of recent revolutions was the key role of social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube). In this paper, we study its role in mobilization. We assume that social media allow potential participants to observe the individual participation decisions of others, while traditional mass media allow potential participants to see only the total number of people who participated before them. We show that when individuals’ willingness to revolt is publicly known, then both sorts of media foster a successful revolution. However, when willingness to revolt is private information, only social media ensure that a revolt succeeds, with mass media multiple outcomes are possible, one of which has individuals not participating in the revolt. This suggests that social media enhance the likelihood that a revolution triumphs more than traditional mass media

The Diffusion of Inclusion: An Open Polity Model of Ethnic Power Sharing

While there is a growing consensus that ethnic inclusion produces peace, less is known about what causes transitions to power sharing between ethnic groups in central governments in multiethnic states. The few studies that have addressed this question have proposed explanations stressing exclusively domestic factors. Yet, power sharing is spatially clustered, which suggests that diffusion may be at play. Inspired by studies of democratic diffusion, we study the spread of inclusive policies with an “open polity model” that explicitly traces diffusion from inclusion in other states. Our findings indicate that the relevant diffusion processes operate primarily at the level of world regions rather than globally or between territorial neighbors. Thus, the more inclusive the region, the more likely a shift to power sharing becomes. Shifts away from inclusion to dominance are less common since World War II, but they are more likely in regional settings characterized by ethnic exclusion

Political opportunity structures, democracy, and civil war

Theories of mobilization suggest that groups are more likely to resort to violence in the presence of political opportunity structures that afford greater prospects for extracting concessions from the government or better opportunities to topple ruling governments. However, existing efforts to consider the possible influences of political opportunity structures on incentives for violence and civil war empirically have almost invariably relied upon measures of democracy to proxy for the hypothesized mechanisms, most notably the argument that the opposing effects of political accommodation and repression will give rise to an inverted U-shaped relationship between democracy and the risk of civil war. The authors detail a number of problems with measures of democracy as proxies for political opportunity structures and develop alternative measures based on the likely risks that political leaders will lose power in irregular challenges and their implications for the incentives for resort to violence. The authors evaluate empirically how the security with which leaders hold office influences the prospects of violent civil conflict. The findings indicate that recent irregular leader entry and transitions indeed increase the risk of conflict onset, while democratic institutions are found to decrease the risk of civil war, after controlling for the new measures of state weakness. </jats:p

Female Labour Force Participation in Arab Countries: The Role of Identity

We investigate why female labour market participation is low in the Arab region. Utilising Akerlof and Kranton's (2000) identity economics approach, we show in a simple gametheoretic framework that women socialised in a traditional family environment violate their identities by taking a job. In the empirical analysis, we study the respective impact of two determinants of identity in the Arab region, Islam and cultural tradition. Employing two waves of the World Values Survey, we find significant evidence that identity affects female labour market participation. Moreover, our estimates suggest that in the Arab region, Muslim women do not participate in the labour market less than non-Muslim women, whereas those with strong traditional identities have a 7 percentage point lower probability of entering the labour market