The Feudal Revolution and Europe's Rise: Institutional Divergence in the Muslim and Christian Worlds before 1500 CE.

Streaming video requires Flash Player, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player to view.Blaydes spoke about the contrasts between the development of Europe and the Islamic world, specifically looking at Egypt. She highlighted how the difference​s in military recruitment in Europe and the Islamic world ended up impacting the state-society relations. She points out that Western Europe and the Islamic world diverged politically before they diverged economically.The Ohio State University. Honors and ScholarsThe Ohio State University. Department of Political ScienceThe Ohio State University. Middle East Studies CenterThe Ohio State University. Department of Near Eastern Languages and CulturesOhio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web page, streaming video, event photo

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

The Churches' Bans on Consanguineous Marriages, Kin-Networks and Democracy

This paper highlights the role of kin-networks for the functioning of modern societies: countries with strong extended families as characterized by a high level of cousin marriages exhibit a weak rule of law and are more likely autocratic. To assess causality, I exploit a quasi-natural experiment. In the early medieval ages the Church started to prohibit kin-marriages. Using the variation in the duration and extent of the Eastern and Western Churches' bans on consanguineous marriages as instrumental variables, reveals highly significant point estimates of the percentage of cousin marriage on an index of democracy. An additional novel instrument, cousin-terms, strengthens this point: the estimates are very similar and do not rest on the European experience alone. Exploiting within country variation of cousin marriages in Italy, as well as within variation of a 'societal marriage pressure' indicator for a larger set of countries support these results. These findings point to a causal effect of marriage patterns on the proper functioning of formal institutions and democracy. The study further suggests that the Churches' marriage rules - by destroying extended kin-groups - led Europe on its special path of institutional and democratic development

STATE OF REPRESSION: Iraq under Saddam Hussein/ Lisa Blaydes.

Includes bibliographical references and index.A new account of modern Iraqi politics that overturns the conventional wisdom about its sectarian divisions0How did Iraq become one of the most repressive dictatorships of the late twentieth century? The conventional wisdom about Iraq's modern political history is that the country was doomed by its diverse social fabric. But in State of Repression, Lisa Blaydes challenges this belief by showing that the country's breakdown was far from inevitable. At the same time, she offers a new way of understanding the behavior of other authoritarian regimes and their populations. Drawing on archival material captured from the headquarters of Saddam Hussein's ruling Ba'th Party in the wake of the 2003 US invasion, Blaydes illuminates the complexities of political life in Iraq, including why certain Iraqis chose to collaborate with the regime while others worked to undermine it. She demonstrates that, despite the Ba'thist regime's pretensions to political hegemony, its frequent reliance on collective punishment of various groups reinforced and cemented identity divisions. In addition, a series of costly external shocks to the economy--resulting from fluctuations in oil prices and Iraq's war with Iran-weakened the capacity of the regime to monitor, co-opt, coerce, and control factions of Iraqi society. In addition to calling into question the common story of modern Iraqi politics, State of Repression offers a new explanation of why and how dictators repress their people in ways that can inadvertently strengthen regime opponents.Cover; Title; Copyright; Dedication; CONTENTS; List of Figures and Tables; Preface; Acknowledgments; 1 Introduction; PART I THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL FOUNDATIONS; 2 Compliance and Resistance under Autocracy; 3 State- and Nation-Building in Iraq, 1973-1979; 4 War Burden and Coalitional Politics, 1980-1991; 5 Political Implications of Economic Embargo, 1991-2003; PART II POLITICAL BEHAVIOR IN IRAQ, 1979-2003; 6 Collaboration and Resistance in Iraqi Kurdistan; 7 Political Orientation and Ba'th Party Participation; 8 Rumors as Resistance; 9 Religion, Identity, and Contentious Politics.10 Military Service, Militias, and Coup Attempts11 Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.1 online resourc

Religion, Patriarchy and the Perpetuation of Harmful Social Conventions: The Case of Female Genital Cutting in Egypt

Abstract How are harmful social practices brought to an end? Female genital cutting (FGC) -also known as female genital mutilation or female circumcision -is among the most widespread human rights violations committed against children, worldwide. While FGC remains a nearly ubiquitous practice among ever-married women in Egypt, significant declines in the practice have been witnessed among younger women and girls. In particular, Egypt's Coptic Christian community has seen steep declines in the practice over time compared to Muslims despite a narrowing of the educational attainment gap between Christians and Muslims in Egypt. Despite significant declines in FGC among Coptic Christians, we find that the gender of a woman's first-born child -an exogenous variable in Egypt where pre-natal sex selection is rare -impacts attitudes toward FGC. Coptic Christian women with first-born sons are more likely to believe FGC should continue; a first-born son is also linked to support for the permissibility of wife beating, suggesting Christian mothers of first-born sons are more invested in social values which harm women than mothers of first-born daughters. No such effect exists for Muslim mothers. Using data from an original survey experiment conducted in Greater Cairo in 2014, we find provide evidence for a link between religious identity and beliefs about the role of women in upholding societal values. We posit that Muslims and Coptic Christians hold different types of patriarchal beliefs -while Coptic Christian respondents exhibit forms of "traditional" patriarchy associated with favoritism toward men, Muslim respondents exhibit patriarchy associated with "fundamentalist" beliefs which tend to simultaneously elevate and burden women by requiring them to serve as virtuous exemplars of societal morals

Rewarding Impatience: A Bargaining and Enforcement Model of OPEC

In this article, I make two primary contributions to the literature on international cooperation. First, I present a simple version of Fearon s bargaining and enforcement model and show that impatience (as captured in the discount factor) can be a source of bargaining strength when the outcome of the bargaining phase is followed by an enforcement phase that resembles a prisoners dilemma. Second, I illustrate how to apply this model to the question of the division of cartel profits within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), particularly with regard to the relationship between bargaining strength and disparate time horizons. I find that for some critical threshold level, states that discount the future more heavily tend to receive better oil production offers than those that do not. I examine empirical evidence that suggests that countries in OPEC fall into the range where this proposition holds; in other words, relatively poor, populous countries and relatively unstable ones are allowed by OPEC to overproduce.I am grateful to Christino Arroyo, Jim DeNardo, Joe Gochal, James Honaker, Shuhei Kurizaki, Drew Linzer, Barry O Neill, Art Stein, Hiroki Takeuchi, George Tsebelis, Jana von Stein, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. I am especially indebted to Ken Schultz for his advice and to Randy Calvert for a helpful discussion during the 2003 EITM Summer Institute at Washington University in St. Louis.

2007) Electoral Budget Cycles under Authoritarianism: Economic Opportunism in Mubarak's

Do authoritarian regimes manipulate economic policy in the run-up to elections? Implicit in traditional models of electoral budget cycles is the idea that voters hold their politicians accountable for poor economic performance in democratic societies. I argue that authoritarian rulers manipulate the economy in many of the same ways that democratically-elected leaders hope to, though with a significant advantage — authoritarians are seldom subject to the same institutional norms of independent economic policymaking found in democracies. I investigate the existence of opportunistic electoral budget cycles in Egypt — the most populous and politically significant country in the Middle East — during the twentyfive years of electoral authoritarianism under current president Hosni Mubarak. I describe the specific mechanisms by which the regime courts three important constituencies: public sector employees, farmers, and the urban poor. Quantitative analysis suggests that these budget manipulations have a number of tangible effects including election-year inflation, a pre-election drain on reserves, and even a higher level of per capita calorie consumption in election years