78 research outputs found
Syria: Prospects for Reform
The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.Ellen Lust-Okar is one of a few scholars who have examined the
prospects for political reform and democratization in Syria. Given
the delicate stability of Syria's authoritarian regime and the
weakness of the political opposition in the country, Lust-Okar
believes that the prospects for democratization in Syria are dim.
However, she argues, it would be counterproductive for the
United States to push for regime change in Syria, in part because
of the difficulty and instability encountered in trying to establish
democracy in Iraq.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent webpag
Social ties amongst lower-income citizens shape support for vote-buying candidates
Across Kenya, Malawi and Zambia, political candidates often attempt to buy the votes of the most socio-economically deprived communities. But new research from Prisca Jöst and Ellen Lust argues that social cohesion in these communities are instrumental in determining the levels of support for candidates who attempt to buy their voters
Poor People\u27s Beliefs and the Dynamics of Clientelism
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 citizenâs 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
Back to field: uncertainty and risk in field research
The rapid spread of COVID-19 beginning in early 2020 caused global disruption. As the risk of infection rose and public health authorities around the world enacted measures to contain the virus, everyday life ground to a halt. Activities that seemed routine in late 2019 became fraught with uncertainty. Fieldwork was no exception. Most field researchers had to change or cancel at least some of their plans; some left their field in a hurry before travel was shut down while others had to lock down on site; most academic institutions restricted travel, with some even prohibiting all forms of international movement. In brief, many traditional forms of fieldwork became all but impossible during the pandemic
Elections in the time of covid-19 : the triple crises around Malawiâs 2020 presidential elections
Abstract: In June 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Malawians went to the polls and voted to replace the incumbent government. Much like other natural disasters, the Covid-19 pandemic and accompanying economic and political shocks had the potential to shake votersâ confidence in the government, reduce turnout, and/or reduce support for the incumbent if voters associated them with the ills of the pandemic. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the Coronavirus pandemic influenced Malawiâs 2020 elections. We consider how fear of infection and economic distress affected citizensâ trust and confidence in President Mutharikaâs government, their willingness to turn out to vote, and their choices at the polls using data collected pre- and post-Covid. We find that fears about the virus and its economic impact did influence trust and confidence in the government to handle Covid but had little to no effect on either abstention or vote choice
Elections and Ethnic Civil War
Existing research on how democratization may influence the risk of civil war tends to consider only changes in the overall level of democracy and rarely examines explicitly the postulated mechanisms relating democratization to incentives for violence. The authors argue that typically highlighted key mechanisms imply that elections should be especially likely to affect ethnic groupsâ inclination to resort to violence. Distinguishing between types of conflict and the order of competitive elections, the authors find that ethnic civil wars are more likely to erupt after competitive elections, especially after first and second elections following periods of no polling. When disaggregating to the level of individual ethnic groups and conflicts over territory or government, the authors find some support for the notion that ethno-nationalist mobilization and sore-loser effects provoke postelectoral violence. More specifically, although large groups in general are more likely to engage in governmental conflicts, they are especially likely to do so after noncompetitive elections. Competitive elections, however, strongly reduce the risk of conflict. </jats:p
LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products
(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in
the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of
science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will
have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is
driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking
an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and
mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at
Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m
effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel
camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second
exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given
night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000
square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5
point-source depth in a single visit in will be (AB). The
project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations
by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg with
, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, ,
covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time
will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a
18,000 deg region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the
anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to . The
remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a
Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products,
including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion
objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures
available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie
The Effects of Electoral Institutions in Rwanda: Why Proportional Representation Supports the Authoritarian Regime
When and where do elections matter? A global test of the democratization by elections hypothesis, 1900â2010
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