Research
Currently, I am involved in several long-running collaborative research projects. Any feedback or comments on them is most welcome. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you would like a copy of the research proposals or working papers from them.
Executive Approval Dynamics and Database
A lack of highly comparable and reliable time series of executive approval has hamstrung the study of executive approval in Comparative Politics and International Relations. While important seminal research has been carried out in each of these fields, many theoretical propositions in the American Politics literature have not been tested in comparative perspective and key institutional hypotheses from the democratization literature also remain untested. One problem is data availability: existing data points are widely dispersed and not placed into accessible time series. Existing, and relatively long, time series are often held by individual analysts and thus highly decentralized. An Executive Approval Database (EAD) seeks to encourage the comparative study of executive approval--its causes, its effects, and its dynamics--by centralizing publicly available (and, eventually some privately held) data in one location. Scholars would have the freedom to choose which data series they believe are most reliable and most comparable, or to combine several of them with various data reduction techniques into single series by case. The research team working on the EAD includes me, Jonathan Hartlyn, Cecilia Martinez-Gallardo, Gregory Love, Matthew Singer, and Timothy Hellwig. But many other scholars and pollsters have collaborated with us by contributing data. We remain grateful for their generosity. Data and further description can be found at the Executive Approval Project's website.
Does Justice Promote Social Cohesion: Dilemmas of Transitional Justice in Colombia
The Colombian government is currently negotiating with the FARC to end five decades of armed insurgency. As they do, they must address the traditional peace vs. justice issues within a new international context demanding higher standards for holding war crimes perpetrators accountable. The government approved a constitutional amendment to reach a compromise, meet its international obligations while also creating incentives for a peace accord: perpetrators could be tried and sentenced in court for war crimes, but then the sentences could be vacated. At the same time, Colombia faces public opinion pressures for retribution. One element of the peace accords includes political reincorporation and participation for the FARC. Even with assurances that the sentences will be vacated, guerillas perceive that facing trial for war crimes will damage their future political prospects. This perception, consequently, reduces their incentives to come in from the cold and submit to a justice process.
We plan to conduct two waves of surveys and interactive strategy scenarios with a representative sample of the Colombian population over twelve months. The surveys will present Colombian citizens a variety of options within a transitional justice menu of options (amnesty, retribution, suspended sentence, reparations, guarantee of non-repetition, political reintegration) and monitor how their attitudes and preferences change over time with different options or combinations of options, or new information is presented. We will also conduct a series of interviews with policymakers, scholars, human rights activists and reporters to gain deeper understanding of the political and social context in which the peace talks are taking place.
Our project has theoretical, empirical and policy objectives. We explore whether transitional justice promotes or undermines social cohesion. As transitional justice international norms solidify, it is important to question the underlying assumptions behind transitional justice theory and advocacy. If justice processes promote social cohesion, that is a powerful motivator for governments to make transitional justice a priority after conflict. If, on the other hand, justice undermines social cohesion and creates further cleavages in already divided society, then justice mechanisms need to be reevaluated and governments need to proceed with caution. Our project will provide the most comprehensive and in-depth analysis to date of the transitional justice elements of the ongoing Colombian peace talks and the dilemmas the government and activists face as they advocate for specific justice choices.
The project is funded by the Institute for International Education Democracy Fellows and Grants Program and USAID Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance, Research and Innovation Grant.
Results from the first wave of our study are available here.
Press coverage of the first wave results in the Washington Post's blog, The Monkey Cage, is linked here.
Results from the first wave of our study are available here.
Press coverage of the second wave results from Semana's special on Reconciliacion Colombiae is online here.
Interpersonal Trust and the Political Environment
The main goal of this project is to assess whether social cleavages and party systems influence interpersonal trust, reciprocity, trust building, and trust restoration. In particular, it examines whether characteristics of the party system (polarization, structuration, number of parties) influence the degree of partisan bias in trust in others. Moreover, the project compares the influence on trust of these political identities, which can be considered largely "elective," to social and personal identities (class, race, ethnicity), which are largely "ascriptive." Social identity theory and theories of cognitive heuristics predict bias towards co-partisans and bias against rival partisans. But the nature and depth of party system cleavages may influence the nature and levels of trustworthiness information party labels deliver. Thus far Gregory Love and I have conducted "trust game" experiments over the internet with student samples in the United States and Chile. In collaboration with others we have conducted additional studies in Uruguay (with Fernanda Boidi and Rosario Queirolo), El Salvador (with Abby Cordova), South Africa (with Daniel Young), Mexico, Spain (with Mariano Torcal), and Portugal (with Mariano Torcal and Pedro Magalhaes). Ideally, we will be able to look at other systems in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere to gain even more variation across cases. We have one paper from this project that havs been published, one that is forthcoming, and on that presently has a Revise and Resubmit status.
As backdrop to this project is a Mellon-LASA Seminar I co-hosted at GSU in April 2012 entitled, "Experiments for Export? Behavioral Experimens in Latin America," to examine how experimental games might be incorporated into Latin American Studies. See this background paper and program for more information, and this link to the Conference website containing among other things a short background of the conference, links to uploaded papers and presentations, and guide for participants.
The Effects of Natural Disasters on Public Opinion in New Democracies
Haiti's massive earthquake, which struck on Janurary 12, 2010, was followed roughly six weeks later by an earthquake and tsunami that rocked Chile on Februray 27, 2010. The human and material devastation varied significantly between these two cases, and so did the institutional context. While research following 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina has shed considerable light on the public opinion consequences of disasters in United States, much less is known about the implications of natural disasters for citizens in new democracies. Suffering damage from these disasters may hamper political support for and the legitimacy of fledgling democratic institutions. To test this and other hypotheses, Gregory Love, Elizabeth Zechmeister, and I are using AmericasBarometer survey data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) along with original GPS data coded-by PSU. This research is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES-#1036411 "RAPID: Collaborative Research: The Political Costs of Natural Disasters: Democratic Support, Authoritarian Attitudes, and Blame Attribution after Chile's 2010 Earthquake").
We have published two papers from this project and will be applying for an NSF grant to fund new research on disaster risk reduction attitudes and framing effects across Latin America.
The Rule of Law: Concepts, Measures and Theories
The spotlight on the rule of law has never shone brighter. Scholars are busy analyzing its implications for a range of outcomes in the realms of the economy, politics, and justice. Policymakers, aid agencies, and NGOs continue to pour vast amounts of money into reforms aimed at enhancing the rule of law in developing contexts. Indeed the budding interest in the rule of law Carothers signaled a decade ago is now in full bloom. Although earnest discussions about the concept itself and measurement issues are underway, there is little consensus about either. In contrast with important advances in the measurement of democracy, scholars have not taken stock of the conceptualization and operationalization of the different rule of law measures systematically. On one hand, consensus on this essentially contested concept may not be rapidly forthcoming, and the rule of law may not be a silver bullet for all problems in all places. On the other hand, if the rule of law is potentially beneficial for democracy, economic development, and/or human rights, then it is critical to develop compelling conceptualizations and valid measures of it in order to subject it to further scientific scrutiny. Simply put, achieving these goals would have global payoffs. At a seminar hosted at Georgia State University in June 2010 a multidisciplinary panel of scholars from law (Rodolfo Sarsfield, CIDE), sociology (Marcelo Bergman, CIDE), and political science (Jeffrey Staton, Emory; Julio Rios-Figueroa, CIDE; Svend-Erik Skaaning and Jorgen Moller, U. Aarhus; Ryan Carlin, GSU) took up the issues of conceptualizing, measuring, and theorizing the rule of law. This panel reconvened at APSA 2010 and an symposium reflecting the work therein will appear as a symposium in The Justice System Journal at the end of 2011. See this background paper for more information.