IRCPPS in the Links: Linking Human Rights and Development Assisstance

via Dart-Throwing Chimp:

...The big idea behind the MCC was to give poor countries stronger incentive to improve their economic and political governance by making a big, new pot of aid funding available, but making access to that pot conditional on countries’ performance on a basket of governance indicators. In theory, it’s like setting up a smoothie bar  in a high-school cafeteria and then telling the hungry students they’ll get free smoothies, but only if they’ve done well enough on their report cards. If they’re hungry enough (and like smoothies enough), anticipation of that reward should encourage them to improve their schoolwork, and everyone ends up better off for it....

IRCPPS in the Links: Analyzing Mexican Gang Violence as Insurgency

via the Monkey Cage:

...The violence in Mexico may not be a classic insurgency , but it is certainly being fought like one.  Like other insurgencies, the violence in Mexico – especially the brutal killings of government officials and civilians – is being used to intimidate local populations and control territory.  The Mexican government provides health, education and other public services to most citizens and provides order and security in the vast majority of towns and cities, including Mexico City.  But the insurgents control about 7 percent of the country, including important drug distribution routes, and they have used violence to do so....

IRCPPS in the Links: More on Framing and Support for Government Programs

via the Monkey Cage:

...The hidden quality of social welfare benefits in the tax code means that many people are largely unaware of them, and have no idea of their overall impact. How could these policies of the submerged state be revealed, and what difference would it make? Matt Guardino and I created a web-based experiment to test the impact of providing people with small amounts of basic information about such policies. We found that it had two basic effects: (1) people who expressed no opinion on such policies in the absence of information became significantly more likely to do so after receiving information; (2) after the provision of information, people adopted views that made sense given their political values and their interests, as defined by income. Overall, opposition grew to the policies that aid predominantly high income people, while support grew for policies that aid low income people....

IRCPPS in the Links: The Super-Committee and Side-Payments

via the Monkey Cage:

...In the end, rather than taking power away from party leaders, the SC process puts them at the center of negotiations from beginning to end, and makes their support an essential component of any successful deal. Given policy deadlock between the House and Senate, leaders’ deployment of side payments is critical for success. Moreover, party leaders can provide important political cover to their caucuses. Leader support of an SC proposal gives their backbenchers a ready-made response to constituent criticisms of a yea vote – in Fenno’s terms, an explanation of Washington activity. It is not surprising, then, that as negotiations on the SC proceed, committee members from both parties are frequently consulting party leaders on both sides of the aisle – these leaders know as well as anyone which deals might be enactable, and control the political and policy resources needed to secure these outcomes....

IRCPPS in the Links: Separation of Powers and the Executive

via the Monkey Cage:

.... A 2002 law allows Americans born in Jerusalem to place on their passports, as the place of their birth, “Israel.”  President George W. Bush objected at the time, in one of his many signing statements, that this bound the executive branch to a diplomatic position it did not hold (U.S. policy is neutral on the provenance of Jerusalem) and should be under no obligation to assert. President Obama has affirmed this position. And so Menachem Zivotovsky (or rather his parents – Menachem was born in 2002) has now sued to uphold the plain text of the statute....

IRCPPS in the Links: Is Mandatory Voting a Polarization Panacea?

via the Monkey Cage:

...the central effect of political campaigns—one identified in over 60 years of research—is to solidify and reinforce the existing social identities as well as partisan, ideological, or policy views of voters.  That is, campaigns tend to bring potentially wayward voters back “in the fold.”  This only tends to polarize voters.  Indeed, it can happen even in the space of a single 30-second ad.  If, under a mandatory voting system, candidates no longer have to worry about mobilizing voters to turn out and can concentrate on persuading voters to support them, I suspect that we would see this same effect, but magnified over the entire electorate.  So it’s entirely possible that mandatory voting may even increase polarization...

IRCPPS in the Links: Does Increased Education Enhance Women's Rights?

Chris Blattman looks at some evidence from Kenya:

...the program increased objective political knowledge, and reduced both acceptance of political authorities and satisfaction with politics. However, in our Kenyan context, this rejection of the status quo did not translate into greater perceived political efficacy, community participation or voting intentions. Instead, the program increased the perceived legitimacy of political violence...

IRCPPS in the Links: How Support For Government Programs Varies When Framed as "Tax Breaks" vs. "Grants"

via the Monkey Cage:

We presented survey respondents with a description of a federal housing program, after which they were asked to rate their approval of the program on a seven-point scale.  About half of respondents received a description of the real-life Home Mortgage Interest Deduction:

IRCPPS in the Links: More on Money in Elections

Chris Blattman notes a paper by Leonard Wantchekon that indicates that spending money isn't always the most effective way to gain votes:

...The experiment took place during the March 2011 elections in Benin and involved 150 randomly selected villages. The treatment group had town hall meetings where voters deliberated over their candidate’s electoral platforms with no cash distribution. The control group had the standard campaign, i.e. one-way communication of the candidate’s platform by himself or his local broker, followed (most of the time) by cash distribution. 

We find that the treatment has a positive effect on turnout. In addition, using village level election returns, we find no significant difference in electoral support for the experimental candidate between treatment and control villages. 

…the positive treatment effect is driven in large part by active information sharing by those who attended the meetings...

IRCPPS in the Links: Does Money Affect the Outcomes of US Elections?

The Monkey Cage tackles the question:

...Candidates who raise a lot of money tend to do better, and it’s more likely than not that at least part of this relationship is due to money paying for things like ads and canvassers that help candidates win over new voters and/or turn out their bases. High-quality challengers may be deterred by large war chests, but other factors such as local political conditions and incumbent quality are more important: in most cases, a much-despised incumbent with a lot of money is in a worse position than a much-liked incumbent with very little money...

IRCPPS in the Links: Post-Election Report - Kyrgyzstan

The Monkey Cage talks Almazbek Atambayev:

...Atambayev becomes the country’s fourth president, following Askar Akaev (1990-2005, ousted during the so-called Tulip Revolution), Kurmanbek Bakiev (2005-2010, whose rule also ended abruptly) and Roza Otunbaeva, who presided over the launch of a new constitution, new parliamentary elections in October 2010, but also a dramatic and bloody descent into chaos in June 2010 as the government witnessed powerless clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in the southern city of Osh, which left several hundreds dead and hundreds of thousands displaced...

IRCPPS in the Links: Insights on the Greek Referendum from Eastern European EU Accessions

The Monkey Cage discusses the Greek bailout referendum:

...In a series of publications with a number of different co-authors,^* I have examined the causes of attitudes towards EU membership in post-communist countries considering membership in theEU (see here and here) and then again in the actual referendum on EU membership in Poland (here). In all three articles, the overwhelming empirical lesson is clear: economic winners are more likely to support EU membership, while economic losers are more likely to oppose EU membership....

Announcement: ISA-NE Conference Program

via ISA:

The annual conference of the International Studies Association-Northeast (ISA-NE) will be held this weekend, 4-5 November 2011, at the Providence Biltmore in Providence, Rhode Island. Panels will be convened on many subjects related to international studies, broadly defined, grouped under this year’s conference theme, Continuity and Change in Global Politics. The conference program has been posted HERE for your review.

IRCPPS in the Links: Can Libya's NTC Pull Itself Up By Its Bootstraps?

Dart-Throwing Chimp examines the challenges Libya's National Transition Council faces going forward:

...Libya is a collapsed state. It has no functioning central authority. The NTC has proclaimed itself to be the country’s national government, and the international community has endorsed that claim, but that claim is only now starting to get tested. The conventional view is that internal authority and external endorsement are intertwined, but that’s an international legal fiction, not real politics. As places like Afghanistan and Somalia remind us, international endorsement does not magically cause domestic factions to fall in line behind the anointed party....

IRCPPS in the Links: Does Prior Experience Impact Presidential Greatness?

John Sides considers the question at 538:

...A new paper by political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Arthur Simonprovides an answer. Knowing that previous studies such as this one haven’t provided much evidence that experience matters, they improve on these studies in several ways. For one, they focus on “modern” presidents, a category that begins with William McKinley (although similar results would emerge if the analysis had begun with Woodrow Wilson or FDR). This is because the modern presidency is a much different job that the presidency of the 1700s and much of 1800s. Messrs. Uscinski and Simon also expand the measurement of presidential greatness to include not just overall ratings but ratings on specific dimensions from the 2009 C-SPAN Survey of Presidential Leadership. Finally, they develop more precise measures of experience. So rather than simply note whether a president served in the military (most presidents did), they count the numbers of years each president served in both wartime and peacetime...

IRCPPS in the Links: Argentina Post-Election Analysis

The Monkey Cage considers Kirchner's recent reelection victory:

...After August everyone predicted that President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) was going to win the general election by an enormous margin, there would be no runoff, and Hermes Binner would finish in second place. That is, the 2nd and 3rd places candidates would fall behind Binner who had come in 4th place in the primary. And this is what really happened...

IRCPPS in the Links: Ireland Post-Election Report

The Monkey Cage takes a look at the new political landscape:

...Michael D Higgins was elected the ninth President of Ireland on Saturday, 29 October 2011 with over one million votes. Higgins was the candidate from the Labour Party, the second largest party in parliament. A frontrunner for much of the campaign, he slipped into second place in the two weeks before the election before re-emerging as the overwhelming choice of the public, securing 39.6% of the first preference vote....

IRCPPS in the Links: Assessing Turkey's Support of the Free Syrian Army

The Monkey Cage takes a look at what the security literature has to say about Turkey's support of the Free Syrian Army:

...Ultimately, research tells us that if the Free Syrian Army is the real deal, then Turkey’s provision of sanctuary heightens the risk of protracted civil war breaking out in Syria. Before this development, civil war was already a risk. But now the risk is much higher. Before territorial protection, the group was no more than a radical flank accompanying a nonviolent campaign. But their new sanctuary will certainly help them build their strength, if not their operational effectiveness, to become a full-blown insurgency....

IRCPPS in the Links: Polling Ballot Measures

The Monkey Cage looks at when you can trust the polls, and when you can't:

...polling is especially difficult where social desirability comes into play, with respondents not wanting to seem homophobic, anti-immigrant, or pro-marijuana.  In fact, the only result that doesn’t make immediate sense from a social desirability standpoint is the null result for ballot measures on restricting gambling.  So while the polling of ballot measures is prone to significant variability, it appears to be those ballot measures that address socially sensitive groups or topics that give rise to the most predictable errors...

IRCPPS in the Links: Administrative Resource Abuse in Elections in Developing Democracies

Dart-Throwing Chimp writes on how this problem manifested itself in Kyrgyzstan:

...seeing that state resources are being used to partisan advantage does not necessarily reveal that a conspiracy is afoot. And the distinction matters. If Atambaev wins and his campaign was aided by overzealous bureaucrats, we have a structural problem. If Atambaev wins and his campaign was aided by a directed effort to take advantage of his party’s incumbency, we have a cheating problem. The first challenge for Kyrgyz watchdogs and international observers is going to be figuring out if there’s fire behind all that smoke about abuse of administrative resources.  If they do find fire, the next–and probably harder–challenge is going to be determining if it was set deliberately by Atambaev or erupted spontaneously under propitious conditions...