The Correlates of Subordination : Transaction Costs and the Design of Military Alliances, 1815-2003

Security relationships between states can be categorized as more or less hierarchical. Some relationships are characterized by dominance and subordination, while others are highly egalitarian. Why relationships vary along this continuum has never been studied quantitatively in the International Relations literature. In this thesis I set out to test the most popular and well-developed theory on this subject, namely the transaction-cost theory of international security relationships. Using a range of variables and datasets from the quantitative International Relations literature, I have developed a research design to test the empirical implications of the transaction-cost theory on the subject of the design of military alliances. Some alliances are designed with hierarchical safeguards that allow a powerful state to restrict the autonomy of a weaker ally, and the transaction-cost theory should be able to account for these alliances. Using a logistic regression model, I have investigated the effects of transaction-cost variables on the choices of alliance design. I find that most of the hypotheses that are derived from the transaction-cost theory are discarded. Meanwhile, a model that includes successful transaction-cost variables offers significant explanatory and predictive power, and is a substantial improvement on a baseline model of variables derived from more mainstream International Relations theory. My analysis provides new and valuable knowledge about which factors are decisive in pushing the governance of security relationships in a hierarchical direction. It seems that powerful states` fears of being pulled into unwanted conflicts, institutional dissimilarity, previous colonial relationships, and asymmetries in size and material power go a long way in explaining why some states end up in hierarchically organized military alliances

Peace Above the Glass Ceiling: The Historial Relationship Between Female Political Empowerment and Civil Conflict

This paper investigates whether female political empowerment is conducive to civil peace, drawing on global data on female political empowerment over a 200 year period, from the Varieties of Democracy database. We augment previous research by expanding the temporal scope, looking at a novel inventory of female empowerment measures, attending to reverse-causality and omitted variable issues, and separating between relevant causal mechanisms. We find a strong link between female political empowerment and civil peace, which is particularly pronounced in the 20th century. When studying mechanisms, we find that this relationship is driven both by women's political participation and the culture that conduces it. To draw causal inferences, we estimate instrumental variable models and perform causal sensitivity tests. This is the strongest evidence to date that there is a robust link between female political empowerment and civil peace, stemming from both institutional and cultural mechanisms

Strukturell rasisme: Et statsvitenskapelig perspektiv

I kjølvannet av drapet på George Floyd og Black Lives Matter-bevegelsen har diskusjonen om strukturell rasisme skutt fart i samfunnsfagene i Norge. Ett perspektiv i denne debatten som sorterer under den retningen som ofte kalles «kritisk raseteori», hevder at konvensjonell samfunnsforskning ikke har epistemologiske, metodologiske eller teoretiske verktøy for å forstå strukturell rasisme, og at forskning på rasisme best kan foregå innenfor et antipositivistisk paradigme.1 Et slikt paradigme er kritisk til konvensjonell vitenskapelig rasjonalitet i studiet av rasisme og (direkte eller indirekte) til sentrale prinsipper i vitenskapelig metode, som måling, systematisering, testing av teorier mot data og objektivitet. I denne tankegangen gjennomsyrer strukturell rasisme alle strukturer i samfunnet, inkludert vitenskapelige fremgangsmåter, i så stor grad at studiet av rasisme bør foregå på andre premisser enn de som understøtter konvensjonell vitenskap, og baseres på andre kilder til kunnskap, som for eksempel personlige erfaringer og narrativer (for en oversikt se for eksempel Delgado & Stefankcic, 2017)

Peace above the glass ceiling: The historical relationship between female political empowerment and civil conflict

Abstract We investigate whether female political empowerment is conducive to civil peace, drawing on global data on female political empowerment over a 200-year period, from the Varieties of Democracy database. We augment previous research by expanding the temporal scope, looking at a novel inventory of female political empowerment measures, attending to reverse-causality and omitted variable issues, and separating between relevant causal mechanisms. We find a strong link between female political empowerment and civil peace, which is particularly pronounced in the twentieth century. We find evidence that this relationship is driven both by women’s political participation—particularly the bottom-up political participation of women, e.g., in civil society—and the culture that conduces it. This is the strongest evidence to date that there is a robust link between female political empowerment and civil peace, stemming from both institutional and cultural mechanisms

Which groups fight? : Customary institutions and communal conflicts in Africa

Why are some ethnic groups embroiled in communal conflicts while others are comparably peaceful? We explore the group-specific correlates of communal conflicts in Africa by utilizing a novel dataset combining ethnographic information on group characteristics with conflict data. Specifically, we investigate whether features of the customary political institutions of ethnic groups matter for their communal-conflict involvement. We show how institutional explanations for conflict, developed to explain state-based wars, can be successfully applied to the customary institutions of ethnic groups. We argue that customary institutions can pacify through facilitating credible nonviolent bargaining. Studying 143 ethnic groups, we provide large-N evidence for such an ‘ethnic civil peace’, showing that groups with a higher number of formalized customary institutions, like houses of chiefs, courts and legislatures, are less prone to communal conflict, both internally and with other groups. We also find some evidence, although slightly weaker, that groups with more inclusive or ‘democratic’ customary institutions are less prone to communal conflicts.publishe

Chaos on Campus: Universities and Mass Political Protest

History suggests universities are hotbeds of political protest. However, the generality and causal nature of this relationship has never been quantified. This article investigates whether universities give rise to political protest, drawing on geocoded information on the location and characteristics of universities and protest events in the 1991–2016 period, at the subnational level in 62 countries in Africa and Central America. Our analysis indicates that university establishments increase protest. We use a difference-in-differences and fixed-effect framework leveraging the temporal variation in universities within subnational grid-cells to estimate the effect of universities on protest. Our analysis indicates that localities with increases in number of universities experience more protest. We suggest a causal interpretation, after performing different tests to evaluate whether this reflects confounding trends specific to locations that establish universities, finding no support for this. We also provide descriptive evidence on the nature of university-related protests, showing that they are more likely to emerge in dictatorships and that protests in university locations are more likely to concern democracy and human rights. These findings yield important general insights into universities’ role as drivers of contentious collective action

Cues To Coup Plotters: Elections as Coup Triggers in Dictatorships

A large proportion of coup attempts in autocracies occur in the aftermath of elections, yet little systematic research exists on the topic. Drawing on recent literature on elections in autocracies, we present an argument to explain postelection coups. While we recognize that electoral institutions have the potential to stabilize autocracies, we illustrate that the election event can spark instability when incumbents reveal electoral weakness. Electoral outcomes—in the form of vote shares and opposition reactions—are signals containing information about the strength of the opposition, and indirectly about the likelihood of a successful full-scale revolution that would compromise the privileged positions of regime elites. In these situations, coups are likely to be initiated to avoid a revolution, either by serving as concessions to the opposition or by facilitating increased repression. We perform a large-N study that supports our argument, significantly nuancing the claim that elections stabilize autocracies

Stairways to Denmark: Does the Sequence of State-building and Democratization Matter for Economic Development?

Building effective state institutions before introducing democracy is widely presumed to improve different development outcomes. We discuss the assumptions that this prominent "stateness-first" argument rests upon and how extant studies fail to correctly specify the counter-factual conditions required to test the argument. In extension, we subject the argument to three sets of tests focused on economic development as the outcome, leveraging new measures of democracy and state institutional features for almost 180 polities with time series extending back to 1789. First, we run standard panel regressions with interactions between state capacity and democracy. Second, we employ coarsened exact matching, specifying and testing different relevant counter-factuals embedded in the stateness-first argument. Finally, we employ sequencing methods to identify historically common sequences of institutional change, and use these sequences as growth predictors. We do not find any evidence supporting the stateness-first argument in either of these tests.The research was funded by the Research Council Norway, "Young Research Talent" grant, pnr 240505. PI: Carl Henrik Knutsen, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, and was also supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Grant M13-0559:1, PI: Staff an I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Who Revolts? Empirically Revisiting the Social Origins of Democracy

Several prominent accounts suggest that democratic transitions are more likely to take place when opposition to the incumbent regime is led by certain social groups. We further develop the argument that opposition movements dominated by industrial workers or the urban middle classes have both the requisite motivation and capacity to bring about democratization. To systematically test this argument, we collect new data on the social composition of antiregime opposition movements, globally from 1900 to 2006. We find that movements dominated by one of these urban groups more often result in democracy, both when compared to other movements and to situations without organized mass opposition. As expected, the relationship is stronger in urban than rural societies, and in more recent decades. When further differentiating the groups and accounting for plausible alternative explanations, the relationship between industrial worker campaigns and democratization is very robust, whereas the evidence is mixed for middle-class campaigns

Updated data on institutions and elections 1960–2012: presenting the IAEP dataset version 2.0

This article presents an updated version of the Institutions and Elections Project (IAEP) dataset. The dataset comprises information on 107 de jure institutional provisions, and 16 variables related to electoral procedures and electoral events, for 170 countries in the period 1960–2012. The dataset is one of the most encompassing datasets on global institutional variation that explicitly codes de jure formal institutions. This article presents the dataset and compares it with existing datasets on political institutions, highlighting how the IAEP’s focus on disaggregated de jure institutions complements existing datasets that combine de facto and de jure elements. We illustrate the potential uses of the data by constructing indices that capture institutional dimensions beyond the standard democracy–autocracy dimension, and that represent different ways of using the data for index construction. Finally, we illustrate potential applications by conducting a short replication and expansion of a recent study of democracy and civil war onset