Scope Conditions Podcast

In democracies all around the world, criminal organizations are involved in electoral politics. Notable examples include the Sicilian mafia and Pablo Escobar's drug cartel in Colombia. We sometimes think of these criminal groups as having politicians in their pockets or as directing politicians to do their bidding at the barrel of a gun.

But our guest today, Jessie Trudeau, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, has spent years studying a different kind of relationship that can evolve between politicians and criminal gangs: candidates for office sometimes hire criminal organizations to be their brokers at election time -- essentially, paying gangs to help them corner the electoral market and mobilize votes. In an award-winning working paper and current book project, Jessie asks why it is that politicians in some parts of the world bring outlaws into their campaigns for office.

We talk with Jessie about the particular qualities of certain criminal organizations that make them especially well suited to scaring up votes, like their control over territory and the relationships they've built with residents. Drawing on extensive interviews she conducted with politicians and gang members in Brazil, Jessie tells us in striking detail about the different forms that these politician-criminal collaborations can take -- from one-off deals to long-term partnerships -- and about the tactics that criminal organizations use -- how they keep competing politicians out and how they induce voters to show up and cast their ballot the "right" way.

Jessie also walks us through the natural experiment that she designed to estimate the electoral bonus that a candidate gets from working with a neighborhood gang. She talks about how she built an unusual over-time dataset tracking criminal group control over each of Rio de Janeiro's 1500 favelas and how she exploited the random assignment of voters to ballot boxes to help her identify the impact of criminal gangs on election outcomes.

Finally, we talk more broadly about the role of criminality in politics and its implications for policy and democratic accountability. What happens when criminal groups get involved in electoral politics not just to earn some extra cash as brokers but to get the kinds of policies they want? Why do criminals sometimes work with politicians as partners but in other places run for office themselves? And what happens to democratic accountability when criminal groups become so good at corralling votes that politicians no longer have to directly appeal to voters' hearts and minds?

Works cited in this episode

Barnes, Nicholas. "Criminal politics: An integrated approach to the study of organized crime, politics, and violence." Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 4 (2017): 967-987.

Magaloni, Beatriz, Edgar Franco-Vivanco, and Vanessa Melo. "Killing in the slums: Social order, criminal governance, and police violence in Rio de Janeiro." American Political Science Review 114, no. 2 (2020): 552-572.

Today on Scope Conditions: college dorms shed light on where group culture comes from and how it molds us.

At Harry Potter’s alma mater, each new student is assigned to a House that aligns with their true character. The mystical Sorting Hat takes the courageous ones and sorts them into House Gryffindor, while the studious know-it-alls go to Ravenclaw. The Sorting Hat may be fiction, but it’s actually a lot like life. Much of the social world works this way: whether by assignment or by self-selection, people often end up in social environments that already fit with their pre-existing beliefs and traits.

For social scientists, what’s often called homophily – this tendency for like to attract like – can make it difficult to study the impact of social context itself. Do people tend to believe and act like those around them because they’re influenced by their surroundings, or because they’re drawn to places that already fit their pre-existing characteristics?

Our guest today, Dr. Joan Ricart-Huguet, found a real-world social setting that helps him untangle these possibilities. At East Africa’s oldest institution of higher education, Makerere University in Uganda, incoming students have for decades been allocated to their residence halls by lottery, rather than by personality type. For Joan, Makerere’s randomly assigned dorms have been the perfect laboratory for studying how the cultural characteristics of a social organization arise, endure, and shape people’s beliefs and habits over time. 

Joan is an assistant professor of political science at Loyola University Maryland, and we talk with him about a pair of recent articles he wrote on cultural emergence, persistence, and transmission. Joan tells us about the months of in-depth interviews and immersive fieldwork he conducted on the Makerere campus as well as the natural experiment afforded by random residential assignment that allowed him to test alternative theories of cultural differentiation, reproduction, and impact.

For example, Joan tells us the stories of how distinct hall cultures emerged historically at Makerere – how Livingston Hall came to be known as the residence of respectful gentlemen while Lumumba Hall earned a reputation for rowdy activism. And we learn about the short- and long-term causal effects of these distinct hall cultures on the young adults assigned by chance to live within them.

Works cited in this episode:
Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books.

Guiso, L., P. Sapienza, and L. Zingales. 2006. "Does Culture Affect Economic Outcomes?’" The Journal of Economic Perspectives 20(2): 23-48.

Henrich, J. P. 2017. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton University Press.

Mead, M. 1956. New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation – Manus, 1928-1953. William Morrow and Company.

Paller, J. W. 2020. Democracy in Ghana: Everyday Politics in Urban Africa. Cambridge University Press.

Ricart-Huguet, J. 2022. "Why Do Different Cultures Form and Persist? Learning from the Case of Makerere University." The Journal of Modern African Studies, 60(4): 429-456.

Ricart-Huguet, J. and E. L. Paluck. 2023. "When the Sorting Hat Sorts Randomly: A Natural Experiment on Culture." Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 18(1): 39-73.

Ross, M.H. 2000. “Culture and Identity in Comparative Political Analysis”. In Culture and Politics: A Reader, edited by Lane Crothers and Charles Lockhart. Palgrave Macmillan.

Sewell Jr., W. H. 1999. “The Concept(s) of Culture”. In Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, edited by V. E. Bonnell and L. Hunt. University of California Press.

Most governments around the world – whether democracies or autocracies – face at least some pressure to respond to citizen concerns on some social problems. But the issues that capture public attention — the ones on which states have incentives to be responsive – aren’t always the issues on which bureaucracies, agents of the state, have the ability to solve problems. What do these public agencies do when citizens’ demands don’t line up with either the supply of state capacity or the incentives of the central state?

Our guest, Dr. Iza Ding, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, examines one way in which bureaucrats try to square this circle. In her recent book The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China, Iza argues that state actors who need to respond but lack substantive capacity can instead choose to perform governance for public audiences. 

Iza explores the puzzling case of China’s Environmental Protection Bureau or the EPB, a bureaucratic agency set up to regulate polluting companies. This issue of polluted air became a national crisis during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics when athletes were struggling to breathe let alone compete. Since then, Chinese citizens have been directing their pollution-related complaints to the EPB, which Iza found, has been given little power by the state to impose fines or shut down polluting factories.
But that doesn’t mean the civil servants working in this agency do nothing. Instead, Iza documents how and why they routinely deploy symbols, language, and theatrical gestures of good governance to give the appearance of dynamic action – all while leaving many environmental problems utterly unaddressed.

We talk with Iza about how she uncovered these performative dynamics through months of ethnographic research in which she was embedded within a Chinese environmental protection agency. She also tells us about how she tested her claims using original media and public opinion data. Finally, we talk about how her findings about performative governance in the environmental space translates to China’s COVID-19 response.


Works cited in this episode:

Beraja, Martin, et al. "AI-Tocracy." The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 138, No. 3, 2023, pp. 1349-1402.

Dimitrov, Martin K. Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China. Oxford University Press, 2023.

Fukuyama, Francis. State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century. London: Profile Books, 2017.

Goffman, Erving. “On Face-Work.” In Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behav­ior, edited by Erving Goffman, pp. 5–45. Chicago: Aldine Transaction, 1967.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Edited by Jeffrey C. Isaac. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations [Book IV-V]. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. New York: Penguin 2010.

Walder, Andrew G. Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Weber, Max. “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings, edited by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.

Weber, Max. “Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology , edited and translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 77–128. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.

Today on Scope Conditions, what’s the secret to successful peacekeeping?

We often think of civil conflict as being driven by organized, armed groups – like rebel militias and state armies. But as our guest today reminds us, a leading cause of conflict around the world is communal violence – fights that break out between civilians over land, cattle, water, and other scarce resources.  When the United Nations sends peacekeepers in to manage a conflict, one of their most important jobs is defusing tensions among neighbors – preventing local disputes from spiraling into widespread violence and derailing a larger peace process. 

Dr. William Nomikos is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Santa Barbara. In his forthcoming book, Local Peace, International Builders: How the UN Builds Peace from the Bottom Up, Will asks why peacekeepers sometimes manage, but other times fail, to keep a lid on communal violence. As he explains to us, the key to successful peacekeeping is being perceived by local populations as an impartial mediator among contending groups. 

But the thing is, a reputation for impartiality isn’t something that a peacekeeping force can manufacture overnight. Whether or not peacekeepers are seen as unbiased in a communal dispute is often shaped by experiences that long predate the contemporary conflict, such as the legacies of colonialism. It turns out that deployments by former colonizers – like French peacekeepers sent to Mali – have a pretty hard time tamping down local conflicts.

Will walks us through the micro-level logic of his theory of impartial peacekeeping, grounded in the psychology of group conflict. We then discuss his multi-pronged empirical strategy for testing the theory – using a novel, highly granular dataset on peacekeeping deployments; in-depth interviews with communal leaders; and lab-in-the-field experiments in Mali. 

And we talk about the policy implications of his findings: is the UN uniquely capable of generating perceptions of fairness and managing communal violence, or can NGOs or regional bodies also get the job done? 

How do revelations of abusive and exploitative behavior by some UN peacekeepers complicate the impartiality picture? 

And if the presence of neutral arbiters is crucial for keeping a lid on violence, then what’s the peacekeeper’s exit strategy?

Works cited in this episode:

Baldwin, Kate. The paradox of traditional chiefs in democratic Africa. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Blair, Robert A., Sabrina M. Karim, and Benjamin S. Morse. "Establishing the rule of law in weak and war-torn states: Evidence from a field experiment with the Liberian National Police." American Political Science Review 113, no. 3 (2019): 641-657.

Hunnicutt, Patrick and William G. Nomikos. 2020. “Nationality, Gender, and Deployments at the Local Level: Introducing the RADPKO Dataset.” International Peacekeeping 27(4):645–672

Russell, Kevin, and Nicholas Sambanis. "Stopping the violence but blocking the peace: dilemmas of foreign-imposed nation building after ethnic war." International Organization 76, no. 1 (2022): 126-163.

Today on Scope Conditions: when is racial status a unifying force in politics?

Shared experiences of prejudice and discrimination can sometimes help create shared political identities within and across racial minority groups and strong incentives for collective mobilization. But as our guest today points out, neither race nor racial-minority status maps neatly onto patterns of political coalition-building. Consider, for instance, the lack of an enduring political alliance between African-American and Afro-Caribbean communities in places like New York City or the absence before the 1970s of a Latino political identity encompassing Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans.

Dr. Jae Yeon Kim, a senior data scientist at Code for America, has been thinking a lot about the conditions under which groups with shared experiences of racialization and discrimination join forces politically, and when political action is organized instead around other social markers like class and ethnicity. In his article “Racism Is Not Enough: Minority Coalition Building in San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver,” published in Studies in American Political Development, Jae unpacks a revealing comparison in patterns of mobilization and alliance-formation across the Chinatowns in these three cities. 

These cities all shared a long history of pervasive and violent anti-Asian racism – which one might have thought would generate a collective race-based political identity. But while Asian coalitions formed to fend off the gentrification of San Francisco’s Chinatown, Vancouver’s ethnic-Chinese population allied with their southern European neighbors, rather than fellow Asian-Canadians, in their fight for affordable housing.

Jae tells us why that is by comparing patterns of residential segregation versus integration that shaped the logic of coalition-building in these three sites. We discuss how he gained analytical leverage for this comparison by looking at different exogenous shocks – natural disasters and duration of Japanese internment – that generated different patterns of settlement.

We also talk with Jae about his broader work on how the experience of racism affects political identities and behaviors. We discuss a study he conducted with Nathan Chan and Vivien Leung that shows how Donald Trump’s anti-Asian rhetoric affected Asian-Americans’ partisan leanings. Jae also tells us about a paper with Reuel Rogers that problematizes the concept of “linked fate” and that analyzes the formation of race-based political identities as contingent processes that hinge heavily on elite strategies and historical dynamics.

Works discussed in the episode:

Chan, N., Kim, J., & Leung, V. (2022). COVID-19 and Asian Americans: How Elite Messaging and Social Exclusion Shape Partisan Attitudes. Perspectives on Politics, 20(2), 618-634. doi:10.1017/S1537592721003091

Dawson, Michael. A Black Counterpublic?: Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s), and Black Politics. Public Culture 1 January 1994; 7 (1): 195–223

Dawson, Michael. Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton 1994).

Kim, Jae Yeon. "Racism is not enough: Minority coalition building in San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver." Studies in American Political Development (2020): 195-215.

Today on Scope Conditions, can we teach voters how to tell truth from lies?

Around the world, governments and political parties wield misinformation as a powerful political weapon – a weapon that is massively amplified by social media. A large and growing literature has investigated how misinformation spreads and ways of combating it – from corrections and warning-labels to educational programs designed to inoculate citizens against untruths. Yet most of what we know about misinformation and its antidotes comes from the US and other Western contexts – places with notably high rates of formal education and internet exposure, where most of the misinformation is on public platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But these are contexts that, to put it simply, don’t look like most of the world.

Our guest today – Dr. Sumitra Badrinathan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at American University’s School of International Service – turns our attention to India – the world’s largest democracy. As in much of the Global South, internet access in India is expanding in leaps and bounds, and misinformation travels more on encrypted chat services like WhatsApp than on Facebook. Over the last few years, Sumitra has been running innovative field experiments testing the effectiveness of misinformation antidotes tailored to the Indian context.

We talk with Sumitra about one of these studies, recently published in the American Political Science Review. As Sumitra explains to us, citizens in India were awash in misinformation during the crucial 2019 election battle, a dynamic exacerbated by increased partisanship in the era of Modi’s BJP and Hindu nationalism. Carried out during the election, Sumitra’s study examines whether Indian citizens can get better at telling truth from lies if you teach them how to do their own online fact-checking.

We find out whether the treatment actually worked – which turns out to be a complicated story. We also dig into Sumitra’s research process – how she was able to get 95% uptake from participants (spoiler: it involved lots of tea) and how she had to change parts of the study on the fly when bringing tablets into the field turned out to be unsafe. And we talk with Sumitra about how her own identity made some parts of the fieldwork more challenging, brought down some barriers, and most of all was something that she had to constantly be aware of as she navigated the complex terrain of running a field experiment.

By the way, this conversation is about just one of the many misinformation antidotes Sumitra has been investigating. If you want to learn about her work on the effects of religious messaging or of peer corrections in combating deception, check out the links to her other papers on the episode webpage.

Today on Scope Conditions: why the judge’s gavel is sometimes mightier than the sword.

Political trials – or show trials – are a well-known mode of repression in authoritarian settings. We often think of a show trial as a sham version of the real thing: the autocrat affords his enemy a semblance of due process to give off the appearance of fairness, even though in reality, the fix is in. On this view, the show trial helps to legitimize arbitrary rule.

Our guest today, Dr. Fiona Shen-Bayh, an assistant professor of Government at the College of William and Mary, tells us that this common understanding of political trials gets things only half right. Sure, the outcome of a show trial is pretty much pre-ordained. But political trials aren’t concessions to norms of legal fairness. Rather, Fiona argues, the trial – the ritual, storytelling, and publicness of a judicial process – is itself a key tool of repression and power-maintenance, especially for rulers facing threats that they can’t see.

We have a terrific conversation with Fiona about her new book, Undue Process: Persecution and Punishment in Autocratic Courts, an analysis of the political logic of show trials in post-independence Anglophone Africa. Fiona explains to us how the pomp and ceremony of the courtroom helps undermine coordination among the dictator’s enemies. We also talk about how autocrats choose between assassinating their opponents and putting them on trial, and about how African dictators find judges who are both competent enough to run a good trial and compliant enough to rig the outcome.

Fiona also tells us how she painstakingly dug through archives to construct an original dataset of coup plots and repressive responses.  We learn how Fiona dealt with the challenge of identifying unsuccessful coup plots and what happened to the plotters – over many decades in seven African countries. Records inside these countries were sparse, so she immersed herself instead in the shadow archives. And if you don’t know what a shadow archive is, you’ll want to listen to find out. We also talk with Fiona about how she managed the inevitable uncertainties of deep archival work – of not knowing whether your months of digging through the files will turn up anything useful.

This is a conversation about courts as political institutions. And we close it out by asking Fiona to reflect on whether this is just an autocratic dynamic, or one that afflicts democracies too. At the end of the day, what is it that keeps courts in liberal democracies from merely serving political ends?

Today on Scope Conditions: what drives discrimination against immigrants – and what can be done about it?

When social scientists have sought to explain anti-immigrant bias, they’ve tended to focus on one of two possible causes: the perceived economic threat that migrants might pose to the native born or the cultural threat driven by differences in race, ethnicity, or religion.

In a new book with Mathias Poertner and Nicholas Sambanis, our guest Donghyun Danny Choi, an assistant professor of political science at Brown, uses an innovative set of field experiments to test an alternative possibility: that the native-born perceive migrants as a threat to longstanding civic norms.

Could anti-immigrant bias be shaped by fears – often unjustified – that newcomers don’t share the same ideas about the meaning and practice of citizenship? Can misperceptions about norm-divergence be corrected? And are there interventions that can actually lead native-born citizens to adopt more cooperative behaviors across ethnic and cultural divides?

In their book Native Bias, Danny and his coauthors try to get at these questions using a wonderfully creative set of experiments, carried out across Germany shortly after the arrival of over a million Syrian refugees. You’ll have to listen to find out how the experiments worked – but for now we’ll just say that they involved dropping thousands of lemons on train platforms. 

We talk with Danny about how the team came up with their experimental designs, how they carried them out, and what they found. One of their most interesting findings is that native German women tend to be more accepting of Muslim female migrants who signal that they hold progressive gender norms. But we also push Danny on the implications of the book’s findings. The treatments in the experiments involve immigrants demonstrably signaling their adherence to dominant German values. Even if this signaling works to dampen discrimination, we wondered how exactly this kind of intervention can be scaled up to the societal level. We also talk with Danny about who the book is saying bears the onus of reducing discrimination: is it up to immigrants to “fit in” better or up to natives to examine their own prejudices?

A little over two years ago, mass protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis, focused public attention on the dramatically higher rates at which the police use force against Black and Latinx people. More broadly, the Black Lives Matter movement has put a spotlight on deep-seated systemic racism in the criminal justice system in the U.S. and beyond. Against this backdrop, many reform advocates have called for a fundamental reorientation of priorities and resources with calls to “defund the police”: to shift money away from armed law enforcement and toward unarmed first responders and investments in communities. 

The phrase “defund the police” has been a powerful rallying cry for millions of Americans seeking to reimagine the relationship between the state and communities of color. However, some critics, including leaders within the Democratic Party, have argued that calls to cut police budgets might undermine support for change by allowing opponents to equate police reform with leaving neighborhoods unpatrolled and unprotected. It’s possible that the slogan “defund the police,” while mobilizing core supporters, turns away other people who actually support the substance of reform.

Our guest today, Dr. Genevieve Bates, is interested in how the way we talk about racial justice in policing shapes public support for reform. Gen is an Assistant Professor of Political Science here with us at UBC, and has to date mostly worked in the fields of international relations and comparative politics, studying transitional justice mechanisms in the wake of civil war. But recently, Gen has teamed up with coauthor Geneva Cole – who studies racial politics in the US – to examine the effect of alternative framings of police reform on public attitudes. 

What they’ve been especially interested in are the ways in which efforts to root out systemic racism in policing look a lot like post-conflict, or post-authoritarian, transitional justice initiatives. This suggests an intriguing possibility: what if, instead of talking about criminal justice reform as defunding the police, advocates framed reform as part of a larger international movement to redress past state abuses and defend human rights? This is the question that Gen and Geneva tackle through a novel survey experiment that they recently carried out in the US.

In this episode, we talk with Gen about the broad criminal-justice reform landscape, about how she and Geneva drew the connection between transitional justice and police reform, how they designed their experimental treatments, and why it’s important to study not just generic support for reform but support for implementing concrete, real-world reforms in people’s own communities.

This episode puts the study of American politics into dialogue with the study of international relations and comparative politics in an unconventional way: by seeing what happens if we ask Americans, who often view their political system as exceptional, to place their own societal conflicts and challenges in a comparative perspective. We also talk with Gen about why and how the study of international relations itself ought to be grappling with issues of race.

Today on Scope Conditions, we’re talking about rising partisan animosity and what can be done about it.

When we think about partisan polarization, we’re often thinking about the United States – and about how the policy attitudes or ideological positions of Republicans and Democrats have moved further and further apart in recent decades. But partisan polarization is far from a uniquely American phenomenon. And it isn’t just about policy attitudes.

Increasingly, political scientists have been attending to the sociological and emotional features of partisan differentiation – to the ways partisanship can become a social identity, with party adherents developing warm feelings toward members of the same political camp – and deep hostility toward citizens on the opposing team. This is known as affective polarization. Moreover, recent studies have shown that affective polarization has been on the rise well beyond the U.S., in places like Switzerland, France, Denmark and – as we learn from our guest today – in Israel. 

Chagai Weiss is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a predoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and co-founder of the Intergroup Relations Workshop. He’s interested in how institutions and interpersonal interactions can shape conflict between social groups. While much of his work has focused on tensions between Jews and Palestinians, we’re talking to Chagai today about the social divide between left and right voters – who often view each other with deep distrust and enmity. In an article just published in Comparative Political Studies, Chagai and coauthor Lotem Bassan-Nygate use a set of natural and survey experiments in Israel to understand the drivers of affective polarization and shed light on potential institutional solutions.

In particular, they’re interested in how elite behavior can exacerbate or mitigate social divisions within the electorate. Does the cut-and-thrust of electoral competition contribute to mutual dislike between the voters of opposing parties? And can elites’ decisions to cooperate across party lines encourage their supporters to better get along? These are the questions Chagai and Lotem are interested in, and they’re especially salient ones right now in Israel – which is currently being governed by an unlikely and unwieldy coalition of left, right, and center parties. But they’re also tricky questions to answer. After all, when we observe elite competition or cooperation, they may be as much consequences of intergroup relations as they are drivers of those relations. 

We talk with Chagai about how he and Lotem gained leverage on these causal relationships by exploiting naturally occurring features of Israeli politics – including how they spotted a research design opportunity in the messy, indeterminate outcome of the fall 2019 Knesset elections.

Chagai also talks to us about the limits to using surveys and survey experiments to learn about the effects of elite behavior and institutions. Because they couldn’t manipulate institutions themselves, Chagai and Lotem manipulate information about elite behavior within institutions. But then it’s not straightforward to map from this light-touch informational treatment to conclusions about the real-world effects of macro-level political arrangements. Ultimately, Chagai suggests that studying institutional effects requires a multi-pronged research program that combines carefully crafted experiments with cross-national comparisons. 

Can autocrats fight online dissent with offline repression?

In the world’s most authoritarian regimes, on-the-ground forms of protest or expressions of dissent are quickly quashed. So the online world – especially social media – has emerged as a critical venue for activists and reformers to express opposition and sustain their movements. 

Given its more diffuse and elusive nature, online activism presents dictators with a new challenge of social control. One possible response is to try to censor online dissent, though it takes a high level of technological sophistication and state capacity to shut down social media opposition completely. Another option is to use physical repression to deal with digital dissent: to throw anti-regime Twitter users in jail. So what happens when autocrats bring old coercive weapons to this new battleground?

This is the question we put to our guest, Dr. Alexandra Siegel, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Alex has been working for years on understanding how political conflict plays out in the online sphere, especially in non-democratic settings. The paper we discuss with Alex – an article, coauthored with Jennifer Pan, that appeared in the American Political Science Review – investigates what happens when the Saudi regime imprisons or tortures activists, religious leaders, and journalists for voicing critical views on social media. Does throwing online critics in jail actually silence them? Does it deter other activists? And how do their legions of online followers react? 

This is a fascinating conversation about the limits to authoritarian coercive capacities in the information age. But it’s also a conversation about the exciting new world of social media-based research. Alex’s work is an elegant example of how scholars can use social-media data not just to capture expression and mobilization in the increasingly vibrant digital public square, but also to tap into mass political cognition more broadly – for instance, using search engine data to track the public’s interest in political events. 

We also ask Alex to reflect on the perils that may lurk in this brave new world of text-as-data and social-media research. Does the sheer vastness of the available troves of data create new opportunities to fish for results – to dig up statistically significant patterns that aren’t actually substantively meaningful? Can we do anything to guard against this risk? And how should we think about the ethical implications of using publicly available data to study the targets of violent repression? How should scholars of online political behavior in autocracies strike a balance between principles of open science and the avoidance of harm to the activists they’re studying?

Today on Scope Conditions, we’re talking about the origins of supranational power.

The European Union has no army. It levies no taxes. Covering a population of 450 million, its administrative bureaucracy is on par with that of a moderate-sized city. And yet the EU’s treaties, directives, and regulations – 50,000 pages worth – are enforced daily across Europe, covering domains from labor relations to financial markets to immigration, consumer protection, and pharmaceuticals. 

What’s more, EU law trumps national law. Judges – national judges – strike down actions by their own governments when those actions contravene EU rules. 

So how did Europe get here? How did European law – which didn’t even exist 70 years ago – become supreme, in a very concrete sense, across 27 independent states?

As our guest argues, it wasn’t overzealous, activist judges who made European law supreme. In fact, in the early decades of European law, most judges knew little about it and preferred not to go near it, let alone overrule their own country’s policies in its name. Dr. Tommaso Pavone, an assistant professor of Law and Politics at the University of Arizona, tells us that the real architects of EU ascendancy were a ragtag band of entrepreneurial lawyers – lawyers who worked behind the scenes to coax reluctant judges into referring cases up to the European Court of Justice – even to the point of writing the judges’ referrals for them. 

We have a fantastic conversation with Tom about his forthcoming book, The Ghostwriters: Lawyers and the Politics behind the Judicial Construction of Europe. In the book, Tom tells the story of a scattered set of actors whom he calls the “Euro-lawyers”: a group of attorneys who had survived the calamity of World War II and believed in the liberal project of European integration. The Euro-lawyers saw that – by crafting the right test cases, educating judges in European law, and sometimes literally ghostwriting their referrals and judgments – they could set in motion a juridical logic that would turn ordinary national courts into street-level enforcers of EU law. 

This is a conversation about how on-the-ground actors – who have little formal authority of their own – can bring about massive macro-institutional change by identifying and exploiting ambiguities in the rules of the game. 

We also talk with Tom about how the argument of his book took shape. He tells us about the moment when the whole direction of the project shifted, from a study of the judges who signed the referrals to an examination of the lawyers who put them up to it. We talk about how he reconstructed the behind-the-scenes work of 12 teams of attorneys who, in the key period, solicited almost half of all referrals to the European Court of Justice. 

And we press Tom on what all of this Euro-lawyering means for democracy. How should we feel about the fact that the European project emerged, in part, from the stratagems of these unelected elites operating by stealth? And what about today’s Euro-lawyers? In an era of mounting Euroskepticism and rising populism, is there scope for them to leverage the European legal order to protect liberal institutions from the predations of would-be authoritarians?

In this episode of Scope Conditions, we ask: what happens when your favorite candidate isn’t even running?

We often think about the quality of democratic representation in terms of the outcomes that citizens get. For instance, we compare the policies a government enacts to what citizens say they want in surveys. Alternatively, we might compare the demographic characteristics of the candidates who make it into office with the demographic makeup of their constituents. 

Our guest today, Dr. Sergio Montero, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester, argues that, if we want to understand representation, it’s helpful to take a step back from the outcomes voters get and to start thinking about the alternatives available to them. If many voters don’t get what they want out of politics, is that because their preferred candidates are losing elections – or because the candidates they’d like to see aren’t even running? After all, if the option you want isn’t even on the menu, there’s a good chance you won’t be happy with the outcome. 

We talk with Sergio about a new paper he has written with Matias Iaryczower and Galileu Kim that develops a novel approach to measuring representation failures in terms of what’s missing from the menu of options. Their approach involves comparing what voters want to the range of candidates available. A big part of the challenge here is figuring out what it is voters want in the first place. This isn’t just a problem of knowing which policies voters prefer, but also identifying what individual characteristics – like gender or level of education – they look for in a legislator. And, crucially, Sergio and his coauthors need a way of assessing how voters trade off between the two: how much voters care about policy positions compared to personal qualities.

We talk with Sergio about how he and his coauthors uncover voter preferences as well as how they place candidates in an ideological space. And we hear what they find when they use their approach to assess the quality of representation in Brazil. We also get into some interesting conceptual questions around what the normative representational standard ought to be: for instance, if it turns out that voters prefer male candidates with business backgrounds, should we call it a representation failure if the slate of options is more female and more working class? And should we call it a democratic deficiency if more extreme voters don’t see their ideal candidates on the ballot?

Today on Scope Conditions, we’re speaking with Dr. Dana El Kurd, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Richmond, about her recent book, Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine. In this book, Dana seeks to unravel a puzzle of Palestinian political development. With the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1994, Palestinians gained the prospect of democratic self-government, with the establishment of an elected Palestinian National Authority and a process intended to culminate in the creation of a Palestinian state. The Palestinian people entered Oslo with a highly mobilized and well-organized civil society — conditions that should, in theory, have set the stage for vibrant civic engagement and the development of responsive institutions.

What Dana observes, however, in the period after Oslo is just the opposite. Not only did Palestinian institutions evolve in an increasingly authoritarian direction, but Palestinian society ended up far less mobilized and much more polarized than it had been under direct Israeli rule. “How,” Dana asks in her new book, “did the [Palestinian Authority] demobilize society, when years of Israeli occupation had failed to do the same thing?” Her argument is that international interference distorted the process of political development, leading the PA to practice a form of “indigenous” autocracy that proved highly effective at dis-organizing and deactivating civil society.

We hear about how Dana brought together interviews with Palestinian officials, protest data, survey experiments and lab experiments to trace out the dynamics of demobilization. We also ask her to reflect on how her argument travels: Does international involvement generally serve to undercut democracy? Is political polarization always demobilizing? Lastly, Dana reflects on her experiences as a Palestinian researcher studying Palestine: both the access that her identity gives her in the field and the ways in which her work is challenged due to her identity.

Today’s episode is Part 2 of our conversation about metaketas with Dr. Tara Slough, an Assistant Professor of Politics at NYU, who co-led with Daniel Rubenson a metaketa on the governance of natural resources that was published this year in PNAS; and Dr. Graeme Blair, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA, who co-led a metaketa with Fotini Christia and Jeremy Weinstein testing the effects of community policing. The main paper from that project was just published last month in Science.

In Part 1, we learned what a metaketa is, how it’s typically organized, and what the benefits are of having coordinated teams experimentally test the same (or very similar) interventions across multiple contexts. We also talked about each of the two EGAP metaketas that Tara and Graeme co-led – the first on natural resource governance and the second on community policing. 

In today’s episode, we talk with Tara and Graeme about deeper conceptual issues, practical constraints, and equity considerations around metaketas. It’s fairly simple to interpret the results if we find the same effect across settings -- but what do we conclude if we see different treatment effects across the different sites? We also ask how far metaketas can get us toward generalizability: it’s one thing to compare results across 6 test sites, but can we extrapolate to other contexts outside of the metaketa?

And while metaketas are a powerful tool, we also learn from Tara and Graeme about their challenges and limitations. What was it like coordinating across six research teams, all with their own local constraints, timelines, and publication incentives? What are the equity concerns that come up when so many resources are allocated to a single question? And we talk about the professional considerations that scholars, particularly junior scholars, should keep in mind when signing up to participate in a metaketa.

As a reminder, we left off in Part 1 discussing how to pool estimates across study sites to get an average treatment effect. This is where we pick up the conversation. 

For references to all the academic works discussed in this episode, visit the episode webpage at https://www.scopeconditionspodcast.com/episodes/episode-24-randomizing-together-part-2-with-tara-slough-and-graeme-blair

The last two decades have seen an explosion of field experimentation in political science and economics. Field experiments are often seen as the gold standard for policy evaluation. If you want to know if an intervention will work, run a randomized controlled trial, and do it in a natural setting. Field experiments offer up a powerful mix of credible causal identification and real-world relevance.

But there’s a catch: if you’ve seen one field experiment, you’ve seen one field experiment. A field experiment is essentially a case study with strong causal evidence. So you now know something about the effects of foreign aid or canvassing or social contact in one corner of the real world – but will those interventions have the same effect in other contexts? 

And if someone else runs their own experiment on the same intervention in some other setting, they’ll probably do it in their own way, shaped by their own pet theory, the demands of their funder, or the interests of their local partner. So, at the end of the day, how will we combine or compare the results? How can learning cumulate if everyone’s doing their own thing?

One promising answer to these questions is the metaketa framework, pioneered by EGAP, the Evidence in Governance and Politics research network. In a metaketa, several teams of researchers coordinate on a harmonized cluster of randomized trials carried out across disparate contexts. So far, EGAP teams have run or planned metaketas on topics such as the role of information in democratic accountability, taxation, and women’s participation in public service advocacy. The idea is that, by running parallel experiments across diverse settings, we’ll learn something about the generalizability of effects.

Our guests today have just finished running two metaketas and join us to reflect on the promise and challenges of learning from coordinated field experiments. Dr. Tara Slough, an Assistant Professor of Politics at NYU, co-led with Daniel Rubenson a metaketa on the governance of natural resources that was published this year in PNAS. Dr. Graeme Blair, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA, co-led a metaketa with Fotini Christia and Jeremy Weinstein testing the effects of community policing. The main paper from that project was just published last month in Science. 

We had such a wonderful, in-depth conversation with Tara and Graeme that we’re dividing it into two parts. In today’s episode, we hear about the projects themselves: the interventions they were evaluating, how they were set up, and what they found. We also talk about the difficulties of choosing and designing a treatment that can be implemented across radically different contexts, and about the analytical subtleties of aggregating estimates across those studies. In Part 2, we’ll get into a set of broader issues surrounding the metaketa strategy, including what coordinated trials can tell us about external validity and the practical challenges of running simultaneous experiments around the world.

For references to all the academic works discussed in this episode, visit the episode webpage at www.scopeconditionspodcast.com/episodes/episode-23-randomizing-together-part-1-with-tara-slough-and-graeme-blair 

Today on Scope Conditions: how the paper-pushers of Empires reshaped colonialism in Southeast Asia. 

Our guest is Dr. Diana Kim, an Assistant Professor at Georgetown’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Hans Kohn member (2021-22) at the Institute for Advanced Studies’ School of Historical Studies. In her award-winning book, Empires of Vice, Diana unpacks the puzzle of opium prohibition in the French and British colonies of Southeast Asia. As she traces out the twists and turns of colonial drug policies, Diana asks how states define the problems they need to solve, and how policymakers come to see crisis in the things they once took for granted. 

For decades, opium was a cornerstone of European colonialism in places like Burma, Malaya, and French Indochina. At their peak, opium taxes made up more than half of all colonial revenues. At the same time, levying a surcharge on what they deemed a peculiarly Asian vice gave the colonizers a sense of moral superiority over their subjects. But over the late 19th and early 20th centuries, colonial governments across Southeast Asia made a sharp reversal toward opium prohibition. 

Why did the French and British choose to crack down on what they had once seen as a fiscal bedrock of empire? How did empires that had grown up so tightly entangled with the opium trade come to see the drug as so deeply troubling? As Diana contends, this dramatic about-face was driven less by dictates from London and Paris and more by the evolving understandings of low-level bureaucrats on the ground in the colonies. Through the day-to-day work of administering policies and keeping records, these minor functionaries developed pet theories, drew casual causal inferences, and constructed new official realities that filtered up to the highest reaches of government – shaping perceptions, issue frames, and policy debates in the metropoles.

We talk with Diana about how imperial drug policies across the region were recast from the bottom-up as rank-and-file bureaucrats puzzled, and often bungled, their way through the everyday challenges of running an empire. We also discuss how Diana pieced together these stories: how she turned troves of archival paperwork, strewn across three continents, into coherent narratives. She tells us how she reconstructed colonial administrators’ interpretive struggles and how she connected the dots from ideas developed on the ground to political debates and decisions back in Europe. 

We also talk with Diana about the unusual portrait she paints of colonial governance: one in which the colonizers assume power before they’ve really figured out what to do with it. Rather than a confident empire imposing its will on its subjects, we see decision-making processes shot through with misperception, unintended consequences, and inner anxieties. We get Diana to reflect on how her account squares with common understandings of imperialism and of the state itself.

For references to all the academic works discussed in this episode, visit the episode webpage at https://www.scopeconditionspodcast.com/episodes/episode-22-why-empires-declared-a-war-on-drugs-with-diana-kim 

Today we are talking about the problem of maintaining social order. In particular, what happens when citizens see the police as ineffective and, in turn, decide to take the law into their own hands? And once mob justice becomes commonplace in a society, what can be done?

In places where the state is weak, citizens often have to take it upon themselves to provide basic public services, such as building schools or collecting the garbage. And, as our guest today tells us, it can also include policing. In parts of the world where the police are seen as corrupt or inept, ordinary citizens often turn to what’s known as mob vigilantism. Groups will form spontaneously to apprehend and inflict violence – sometimes extreme violence – upon those they suspect of committing crimes. In some places, mob justice is exceedingly common: in South Africa, for instance, the police registered two mob vigilante murders per day in 2018 (and that is likely an undercount). 

Mob vigilantism represents a deep breakdown in citizen trust in the state’s ability to maintain social order. Is there anything that governments or civil society can do to boost confidence in the state and, in turn, head off mob violence? Our guest, Dr. Anna Wilke, has recently completed a novel field experiment to address this question in the context of South Africa. Currently a postdoctoral fellow with Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) at the University of California, Berkeley, Anna will be joining the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis as an Assistant Professor next fall.

For the experiment, Anna partnered with a local non-profit to test the effects of a simple intervention: the installation of a home-based alarm system. When a resident or intruder triggers the alarm, it directly texts the local police precinct with the geolocation of the household – in principle, allowing the police to find and respond to criminal incidents more quickly. The question Anna asks is: Does enhancing the responsiveness of local law enforcement lead citizens to see the police as more effective and to resort less to mob violence?

In addition to hearing about her findings, we have a great conversation with Anna about the practical and inferential challenges she encountered in implementing and analyzing her experiment. For instance, it turns out that some of the things that make it hard for the state to effectively manage social problems – like the lack of street addresses in informally settled neighborhoods – also make it hard to sample and survey in these places.
 
Anna also had to deal with all the messiness of running an experiment in the real world, rather than in a controlled setting. This includes the possibility that she was not just treating the people she gave the alarm to, but also their neighbors, who might have also perceived themselves as having quicker access to the police.

Finally, we bring Anna’s research into the larger conversation around policing and racial bias, and ask: what does it mean to increase police presence and public reliance on the police when there is also systemic police abuse?

For references to all the academic works discussed in this episode, visit the episode webpage at https://www.scopeconditionspodcast.com/episodes/episode2-1.

By their very nature, autocracies are political systems in which power is highly concentrated; dictators can do pretty much as they please. So dictatorships might seem an unusual place to go looking for institutions: the rules and structures that limit discretion and set bounds on who can do what.

Yet over the last two decades, political scientists studying autocracies have done exactly that. The field has witnessed what Tom Pepinsky has called “an institutional turn” in the study of authoritarianism, with scholars such as Barbara Geddes, Jason Brownlee, and Jennifer Gandhi analyzing how institutions like dominant parties and elected legislatures order political life in autocracies and help ensure the survival of these regimes.

<a href='http://www.annemeng.com/'><em>Dr. Anne Meng</em></a>, an assistant professor of politics at the University of Virginia, began her own research on autocratic institutions with a focus on ruling parties. She eventually came to believe, however, that parties and legislatures were mostly a sideshow, and that she and other scholars of autocratic institutions had been getting something fundamentally wrong. They were too focused on de jure rules that appear constraining and insufficiently focused on de facto power: on whether institutions have any impact on the distribution of actual leverage within the political system.

Anne’s recent book, Constraining Dictatorship, is an analysis of how and why autocrats use institutions to share real power with their rivals, and of how these institutions shape the regime’s long-run trajectory. Anne also argues that the institutions that matter most are devices that we usually overlook, such as succession rules and cabinet appointments.

In our conversation with Anne, we probe the logic of her innovative argument and hear about how she confronted the difficulties of testing it empirically, like how to measure the elusive concept of leader strength. We also talk about the formal model she developed and how it helped her clarify the tradeoffs that leaders confront as they choose between short-term material gains and long-run survival in office.

More broadly, this is a conversation about what it is, fundamentally, that allows institutions to lend order to political life, and about how we can identify meaningful institutional and political change when we see it. You will also want to stay tuned to hear how Anne wrote the bulk of this book in a single semester.

You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.

Our guest today is Dr. Mai Hassan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Mai is the author of a recent book, Regime Threats and State Solutions, about how leaders manipulate the bureaucracy to maintain their hold on power.

Imagine a political system in which the president has the power to hire, fire, and shuffle bureaucrats in the most important state agencies. How would the leader strategically choose to wield this authority? Perhaps she would decide to pack the state with her own supporters -- for example, with members of her ethnic group -- to ensure loyalty and to maximize the chances that presidential edicts will be faithfully carried out.

However, holding power often means striking bargains with rival elites. Usually the best way to do that is to give those rival elites a foothold in the state and to hand out jobs to their supporters. A leader who packs the state has fewer spoils to share.

Mai’s book delves into this core dilemma of power-maintenance: how can leaders keep their friends close and their enemies closer? When do executives opt to share power, and when do they choose to hoard it by staffing the state with loyalists?

In today’s episode, we talk with Mai about her theory of bureaucratic control. It’s an argument in which leaders don’t merely choose bureaucrats based on their loyalties; they also manipulate civil servants’ loyalties and attachments, by strategically placing them and shuffling them across regions of the country.

We also talk about how Mai tests her argument by using a vast original dataset on decades of Kenyan administrative appointments, spanning both the country’s autocratic and democratic periods. And Mai tells us how she stumbled onto the puzzle of bureaucratic manipulation while digging through archival data for an altogether different project.

You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.