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"LUST, ELLEN"
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Land and Legibility: When Do Citizens Expect Secure Property Rights in Weak States?
Legibility and political authority are often conflated in debates over formalization processes, including land titling. This can lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is that citizens anticipate would strengthen their property rights. This study examines the effects of legibility on citizens’ evaluations of property rights in Malawi, a country with limited but increasing land titling. We argue that legibility is a strategic resource for citizens, which has value in itself. To disentangle the effects of legibility and authority on tenure security, we employ a survey experiment. Our findings show that respondents perceived land with written property rights to be more secure and more desirable regardless of whether a state or customary authority granted these land rights. In contrast to scholarship that examines legibility as a technology of state control, this research suggests that legibility can help citizens advance their interests.
Journal Article
COMPETITIVE CLIENTELISM IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Members in the elected lower houses rarely legislate, but rather consider laws formulated by the government. [...] in countries such as Jordan and Egypt, an appointed upper house effectively holds veto power.
Journal Article
Divided They Rule: The Management and Manipulation of Political Opposition
How do state-created institutions influence government-opposition relations during prolonged economic crises? Different experiences in Morocco and Jordan challenge the widespread notion that economic crises promote political opposition. While the opposition in Jordan consistently demanded reform, the opposition in Morocco initially challenged the regime but then became unwilling to challenge it further as the crisis continued. Different institutional structures explain these strategies. In Jordan formal institutions did not promote divisions between opposition groups, and opposition elites were more likely to mobilize political unrest. In Morocco incumbent elites divided political opposition into loyalist and radical camps, and the loyalist opposition became unwilling to mobilize unrest.
Journal Article
The Economics of Social Science Research & Knowledge Production in the Middle East & North Africa
Social science research on the Middle East and North Africa depends heavily on external funding. In this essay, we consider the implications of this reliance. In our review of calls for proposals and 924 grants and projects from 23 organizations, we find that this funding often centers the issues that Western policymakers view as salient but does not necessarily reflect the major concerns of those in the region; the funding recipients favor political science, leaving other disciplinary perspectives less developed; and the funding focuses heavily on select countries, while others remain understudied. Our investigation also uncovered a lack of coordination in funding that, combined with a fragmented research landscape, impedes knowledge accumulation. We conclude our findings with recommendations for steps that can be taken to overcome these problems.
Journal Article
Layered Authority and Social Institutions: Reconsidering State-Centric Theory and Development Policy
Political scientists, development specialists, and policymakers assume a central place for states and state action as they define problems and design solutions. They ascribe to the state dominance over all other social organizations, viewing it as pervasive and inevitably triumphant. Even scholars such as Joel Migdal, Timothy Mitchell, and James Scott, who focus on the boundaries of the state, portray the state as more organized, technologically savvy, and capable of extending its power than social counterparts, putting the latter on the defensive. Scholars and policymakers alike also have arrogated to the state the moral monopoly to pursue certain imperatives that other organizational forms can and do aspire to provide. These include providing security and protection from predation, allocating scarce resources, and arbitrating values and interests in society.
Journal Article
Missing the Third Wave: Islam, Institutions, and Democracy in the Middle East
This article explores why some societies witnessed less political liberalization during the Third Wave of democratization than others, and importantly, the conditions under which opposition forces may refrain from pressing for political reform. Focusing on the Muslim world, it also presents a more complete understanding of when and how political Islam hinders democratization. Specifically, historical experiences with Islamists in the 1970s and institutional structures established by the 1980s created a condition of uncertainty that enabled some incumbents to thwart liberalization during the Third Wave. Incumbents exploited the fear of political Islam, convincing many secularist opponents that they were better off with the current regime than with Islamist rule. The extent to which incumbents could succeed varied, depending on whether or not Islamist movements had been allowed to mobilize openly and the extent that the regime based its legitimacy on Islam. The argument extends beyond the Muslim world. What is fundamentally at stake is not whether Islam exists as a mobilizing ideology, but whether democratically-minded opponents believe that non-democratic opposition groups exist that would potentially subvert a democratic opening.
Journal Article
Multiple Measurements, Elusive Agreement, and Unstable Outcomes in the Study of Regime Change
This comprehensive analysis of regime change indicators reveals that problems of conceptualization and measurement are major reasons why current quantitative research fails to draw compelling conclusions that foster cumulative knowledge. The article first proposes the distinction between two forms of regime change—rupture and reform—and discusses the specific conceptual and measurement challenges scholars encounter yet largely fail to address when studying either form of change. Second, the article shows that agreement between indicators of regime change is low and driven by focal points such as elections and coups, suggesting that such measures often reflect notable events instead of regime change per se. This implies that indicator choice determines the set of cases for causal inference. Finally, a robustness check of nine articles on regime change published in top journals demonstrates that findings are often not robust to alternative indicators, implying that indicator choice influences the results of quantitative studies.
Journal Article