Abstracting: The Democratic Deficit in US States

In the Monkey Cage, Andrew Gelman passes along an article by Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips:

We study how well states translate public opinion into policy. Using national surveys and advances in subnational opinion estimation, we estimate state-level support for 39 policies across eight issue areas, including abortion, law enforcement, health care, and education. We show that policy is highly responsive to policy-specific opinion, even controlling for other influences. But we also uncover a striking “democratic deficit”: policy is congruent with majority will only half the time. The analysis considers the influence of institutions, salience, partisan control of government, and interest groups on the magnitude and ideological direction of this democratic deficit. We find the largest influences to be legislative professionalization, term limits, and issue salience. Partisanship and interest groups affect the ideological balance of incongruence more than the aggregate degree thereof. Finally, policy is overresponsive to ideology and party—leading policy to be polarized relative to state electorates.

Abstracting: Conducting Social Science Research in "Internet Time"

New paper by David Karpf posted on SSRN about how the fast diffusion of ideas through the Internet is challenging traditional social science methodology and what social scientists need to do to stay ahead of the curve:

This paper discusses three interrelated challenges related to conducting social science research in “Internet Time.” The rate at which the Internet is both diffusing through society and also developing new capacities is unprecedented. It creates some novel challenges for scholarly research. Many of our most robust research methods are based upon ceteris paribus assumptions that do not hold in the online environment. The rate of change online narrows the range of questions that can be answered using traditional tools. Meanwhile, new research methods are untested and often rely upon data sources that are incomplete and systematically flawed. The paper details these challenges, then proposes that scholars embrace the values of transparency and kludginess in order to answer important research questions in a rapidly-changing communications environment.

Abstracting: The Role of Al-Azhar in Post-Revolutionary Egypt

A Carnegie Endowment for Peace Paper by Nathan J. Brown:

All political forces in Egypt seem to agree: The country’s premier religious institution, al-Azhar, must be made more independent from the regime. But that agreement is deeply misleading; it masks a struggle within al-Azhar and among leading political forces over its role in Egyptian society. Part mosque, part university, part center of religious research and knowledge, al-Azhar is perhaps the central—and certainly the most prestigious—element in the state–religion complex in Egypt. 

Abstracting: The Promethean Dilemma: Third-party State-building in Occupied Territories by Darden and Mylonas

In the upcoming issues of Ethnopolitics:

Contemporary occupying powers seeking to build states on foreign soil are faced with a fundamental dilemma: How can they transfer coercive and organizational capacity to the local population without such capabilities being used to undermine the occupiers’ efforts to establish stable governance of the territory? Current thinking holds that the best way to manage the transition is to do it quickly, either by recruiting indigenous army and police units as rapidly as possible or by co-opting pre-existing groups of fighters to make them serve the state. If the occupier can build roads, provide public services, and expand the army and the police, so the thinking currently goes, he will achieve the necessary ‘buy-in’ from the local population that will allow him to pack up his things and go home, leaving a stable new order in his stead. When it comes to putting guns in the hands of the indigenous population, sooner is better.

Abstracting: The Side Effects of Food Aid

via Chris Blattman:

The Price Effects of Cash Versus In-Kind Transfers 

Jesse M. Cunha, Giacomo De Giorgi, Seema Jayachandran
NBER Working Paper No. 17456
Issued in September 2011
NBER Program(s):   PE  

This paper compares how cash and in-kind transfers affect local prices. Both types of transfers increase the demand for normal goods, but only in-kind transfers also increase supply. Hence, in-kind transfers should lead to lower prices than cash transfers, which helps consumers at the expense of local producers. We test and confirm this prediction using a program in Mexico that randomly assigned villages to receive boxes of food (trucked into the village), equivalently-valued cash transfers, or no transfers. The pecuniary benefit to consumers of in-kind transfers, relative to cash transfers, equals 11% of the direct transfer.