Day 1

Clash of Ideologies: Evidence from U.S.-China Competitive Vote Alignment Formation in UNGA

Abstract

How does ideology shape the international system? In particular, when rising and established powers (i.e., China and the United States) hold separate and distinct core political values, is their competition uniquely a struggle for power or additionally, a meaningful contest of ideologies? To answer this question, we must identify the role of ideology in the choices and incentives that comprise inter-state interactions; yet, modeling these dynamics remains profoundly challenging in strategic settings. In this article, we introduce an Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM) framework that 1) offers a formal model which considers outcomes of “aid for vote” in United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) determined by three players’ individual preferences and strategic interactions taken together, and then 2) converts this theoretical model into a Bayesian statistical estimator to empirically disentangle the effects of ideological factors on choices and preferences. Empirical results suggest that vote alignment falls along the “democratic-authoritarian” ideological division line due to the competitive efforts of the United States and China. Moreover, results suggest that regime types fundamentally shape preferences for the three actors: both the U.S. and China rely on the “principle” of gaining support through shared political values, and ideological inclinations are driving forces for other nations’ voting choices. This article thus highlights the surging concerns about the clash of ideologies between the U.S. and China within the overall international system.

A Latent Factor Approach to Missing not at Random

Abstract

Missing data is prevalent in social science datasets. The problem becomes more challenging under missing not at random (MNAR) scenario, such as missingness in sensitive survey questions. Existing multiple imputation methods assumes missing at random (MAR), which is a more restrictive assumption than MNAR. This paper confronts MNAR by modeling the latent structure of the missingness to neutralize the influence of the unmeasured confounders that cause the missing values. This approach allows one to assume missing at random (MAR) conditional on the latent factor. The proposed method outperforms multiple imputation under MNAR, when missingness is caused by unobserved confounders. In addition to simulation, I show an application using latent utility model to impute the missing values in a self-reported ideology question, which is considered to be a sensitive question in the 2017 Chinese Netizen Survey dataset. I conclude the paper with discussions of the scope of the method and potential extensions.

Public Support for Democracy, Regime Change, and the Importance of Incorporating Measurement Uncertainty

Abstract

Do democratic regimes depend on public support to avoid backsliding? Does public support, in turn, respond thermostatically to changes in democracy? Two prominent recent studies (Claassen 2020a, 2020b) reinvigorated the classic hypothesis on the positive relationship between public support for democracy and regime survival—and challenged its reciprocal counterpart—by using a latent variable approach to measure mass democratic support from cross-national survey data. But such approaches come with concomitant measurement uncertainty, and neither study incorporated this uncertainty into its analyses. In this letter, we correctly take this uncertainty in account and show that there is no support for the conclusion of either study. We then work to minimize the measurement uncertainty in public support by bringing additional survey data and a superior model of public opinion. Even with these improvements, however, our analyses fail to yield evidence in support of either hypothesis, underscoring the necessity of accounting for measurement uncertainty.

Curses or Blessings: How Low Asset Mobility Helps Foreign Firms Gain Government Support

Abstract

Low asset mobility is often seen as undermining the bargaining power of investors. This article advances an alternative view that emphasizes the positive effects of low asset mobility. I argue that governments prefer foreign firms with immobile assets because their commitment to stay is always more credible. I present a formal model to illustrate three crucial theoretical mechanisms: 1) the inverse credible commitment problem, 2) political concerns associated with firm performance, and 3) the intensity of competition for investments. I substantiate the theoretical predictions using data from China. Leveraging a policy change in enterprise income taxes in 2008, I use a difference in differences design to show that foreign firms with lower asset mobility are less likely to become targets of local governments’ predatory behaviors.

Agents of State Control? Neighbourhood Organisations and Authoritarian Rule

Abstract

Key to authoritarian politics is maintaining social control over the masses. To this end the ruling regime may employ a variety of instruments, from restricted elections to the secret police, to achieve compliance and surveillance. However, most such instruments studied so far do not reach or cover the grassroots level sufficiently, leaving the issue of authoritarian control on the ground an open question. In this paper we study a largely overlooked type of instruments, neighbourhood organisations (NOs), to help address the issue. Nominally citizen-led but practically state-controlled, these organisations can perform the key control tasks of policy enforcement and information gathering for the regime in grassroots urban space. Specifically, we identify the main factors for such functions as their dual characters of local embeddedness and state dependency. Using an original 11-year panel from 31 Chinese regions, we show with mixed beta models a robust positive association between regime domestic security concerns and neighbourhood organisation staff coverage, as strong evidence for the NO-based control model. Drawing on present and related evidence, we argue that these organisations can strengthen the autocrat’s control over local society and consolidate its rule from the bottom-up. We duly call for greater attention to the local level of politics in authoritarian studies.

Legislators’ Sentiment Analysis Supervised by Legislators

Abstract

The sentiment expressed in legislator’s speech is informative, in particular in a legislature with partisan discipline. But extracting legislators’ sentiment requires polarity dictionaries or labeled data, which are labor-intensive to construct and could be subjective. To address this challenge, we propose a research design to exploit closing debates on a bill, where legislators themselves label their speech by pro or con. We apply our method to the corpora of all speeches in the Japanese national legislature, 1955–2014. After establishing the face validity of our sentiment scores, we show that, to a moderate degree, government backbenchers and opposition members get more polarized as the next election is approaching, although both sides come together towards the end of a legislative session.

Racial Discrimination Against Blacks in the United States

Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover: The Role of Intergroup Contact in Reducing Prejudice in Conflict Settings

Abstract

We study the potential for pleasant and cooperative contact to reduce preconceived prejudice between religious groups in the context of India. We randomly assign Hindus and Muslims into groups, in which they interact over the course of a week-long vocational training program. We find that intergroup contact reduces the prejudice of both Hindu and Muslim participants toward members of the other religion one week after the training program concluded. While we find that most of the positive effect of intergroup contact on reducing prejudice dissipates after six months, the baseline results for Hindu attitudes toward Muslims are persistent.

Avoiding Measurement Error Bias in Conjoint Analysis

Abstract

Conjoint analysis is a survey methodology spreading fast across the social sciences and marketing due to its capacity to disentangle many causal effects in a single experiment. We show that conjoint designs are also remarkably prone to measurement error, revealed by surprisingly low levels of intra-coder reliability. Although measurement error in (binary outcome) conjoint questions can in theory exaggerate, attenuate, or give incorrect signs for any estimated causal effect, we reanalyze many applications and find a nearly universal empirical result that measurement error in this context attenuates causal effects, meaning that the true effect is larger than it seems. We show how to estimate and correct for this attenuation bias, endemic throughout the literature. We also offer easy-to-use open source software that implements all methods described herein.

The Small L Problem in Conjoint Experiment: Estimating the Complier Average Causal Effect from Small L Attributes in Conjoint Experiment

The Effects of Government Ideological Turnovers on Civil War Peace Agreements: Evidence from Democratic Countries

Abstract

What explains the implementation of civil war peace agreements in democratic countries? In this study, I address this question by explaining how government ideological turnovers on the left-right scale are linked to the implementation of civil war peace agreements. Analysing a compiled panel dataset that covers peace agreements of 11 democratic countries from 1989 to 2015, I argue that the implementation of peace agreements declines following left-wing governments assume office. Hence, this study is critical of the hawkish-dovish argument according to which, left-wing governments tend to be dovish as opposed to hawkish right-wing governments. However, the findings of this investigation are consistent with another body of literature that right-wing hawkish governments do not have a fear of electoral punishment for adopting dovish policies. Moreover, secondary literature suggests that left governments always cannot adopt dovish policies due to the lack of party discipline, power struggle, and leadership crisis as is observed in India, Nepal, and El Salvador. Taken together, these findings suggest that the implementation of peace agreements in democratic countries fundamentally relies on which political parties control the government.

Identity-Based Cleavage Matters: Success and Failure of International Mediation in Civil War

Abstract

With the increase of civil wars after the Cold War and the surge in the 1990s, the question how internal conflicts can be terminated has been put on the research agenda so that effective strategies can be taken to promote international peace. In managing civil conflicts, international mediation has become a major peace promoting approach, which sometimes succeeds but sometimes fails in bringing peace. Based on statistical analyses, this research explores why civil war mediation is sometimes successful but sometimes not by focusing on identity-based cleavages between warring parties. By testing two hypotheses, the study finds that the variation in the outcomes of civil war mediation can be explained by the number of identity-based cleavages (ethnic and religious) between warring parties in civil wars. The likelihood of successful mediation in civil wars decreases as there is an ethnic or/and religious cleavage between warring parties, and the likelihood decreases as the number of cleavages increases. The result holds when the mediation success is measured as both reaching a comprehensive agreement and other types of peace agreement between warring parties with the help of mediators. The finding suggests that mediators who want to resolve a civil conflict should pay attention to not only their own leverage but also the identity-based cleavages that might exist between warring parties.

How Do Member States Evaluate The UN Collective Security System?

UN Peacekeeping Contribution and Status Enhancement

Abstract

A large literature sees status and reputation as drivers of international conflict onset, understanding status-seeking events as necessarily salient and dramatic. However, it may also be possible that status can be achieved via more quiet means such as peacekeeping. Accordingly, qualitative scholars regularly identify status and reputation as key motivations to contribute to peacekeeping missions. However, there is no systematic evidence that peacekeeping contributions really enhance a country’s status, possibly due to the difficulties associated with measuring status. Based on the literature’s theory of social mobility and social creativity, I propose a network theory (i.e. invitation continuation, cooperation continuation, signalling theory) that UN peacekeeping network can influence military status network. I use Defence Cooperation Agreement (DCA) network to measure military status network for signing an agreement shows military interaction and perceptive recognition, which echoes status. In other words, I am interested in whether peacekeeping ties can explain the formation of DCA ties and hypothesise that if a sender establishes more peacekeeping ties, the sender will also establish more DCA ties. I use (temporal) exponential random graph methods to test this network theory.

Paragraph-citation Topic Models for Corpora with Citation Networks

Beyond LATE: Identification of ATEs of Always-Takers and Never-Takers

Recovering Dimensional Information using L1 Norm Based Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Method

Matching with Networks: How to Measure the Causal Effects of Regional Trade Agreements