UCLA Political Science

Choosing (All) Together
2018-02-28 00:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Choosing (All) Together
DateFebruary 26, 2014
Time7:00am to 9:00am
Location
4276 Bunche Hall
Contact
This article provides a game theoretic analysis of group decision making, investigating how agents’ communication behavior is affected by different voting systems. We show that in an ideal state where communication is noisy but agents can communicate without opportunity costs, agents will always reach unanimous consensus regardless of which voting system governs the deliberative process. This is because agents anticipate their future agreement and hence, in equilibrium, communicate truthfully and vote sincerely. As a result, the agents’ private information is aggregated efficiently, making the deliberative process optimal. We further show that under the more realistic case in which communication involves opportunity costs, voting systems shape agents’ communication behavior. Specifically, when the opportunity costs of communication are low, a voting system based on unanimity approximates the results of the ideal state. Conversely, when communication involves high opportunity costs, a voting system based on majority is more desirable. These results shed some lights on the rationale of institutions such as juries, committees, and large deliberative assemblies.
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Benjamin Lessing's Talk
2018-02-26 00:00
Benjamin Lessing’s Talk
DateFebruary 26, 2018
Time12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone (310)206-7558bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu
Paper
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Do Politicians Reward Their Supporters? Evidence from the Spatial Allocation of Constituency Development Fund Spending in Kenya
2018-02-26 00:00
Do Politicians Reward Their Supporters? Evidence from the Spatial Allocation of Constituency Development Fund Spending in Kenya
DateFebruary 24, 2014
Time4:00am to 5:30am
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
We draw on data on the spatial allocation of more than 50,000 constituency development fund projects in more than 200 electoral constituencies in Kenya to test leading theories of distributive politics.
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Paola Marrati's Talk
2018-02-23 00:00
Paola Marrati’s Talk
DateFebruary 23, 2018
Time4:00pm to 6:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone (310)206-7558bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu
A Voice’s of One’s Own. Cavell on Wittgenstein, Emerson, and Democracy
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REP Workshop - Anna Sampaio
2018-02-23 00:00
REP Workshop – Anna Sampaio
DateFebruary 19, 2016
Time4:00pm to 6:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Professor Sampaio will be talking about her new book:(Terrorizing Latina/o Immigrants: Race, Gender, and Immigration Politics in the Age of Security, 2015, Temple University Press)
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Varieties of Corruption: The Organization of Rent-Sharing in India
2018-02-23 00:00
Varieties of Corruption: The Organization of Rent-Sharing in India
DateFebruary 21, 2014
Time6:00am to 7:30am
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Studies of corruption shed little light on ways in which corrupt rents are distributed across actors—insights that would prove enlightening for efforts to reduce corruption. I posit that the type of state resource over which actors are attempting to gain control—e.g. permits and licenses versus access to benefits from welfare schemes—shapes the character of control over resource allocation and so is a key predictor of patterns in rent-sharing. I present a framework for categorizing corrupt acts that emphasizes variation in the type of government resource and highlights disparities in the character of illicit payments across multiple realms of government activity. I then draw on new and original data from surveys of Indian politicians and bureaucrats and a new measure of rent dispersion, the effective distribution of rents (EDR), to show that there is considerable sharing of rents across government and non-government actors and that the perceived distribution of rents is strongly associated with the type of government resource. My evidence also shows that rent-sharing occurs to similar degrees for different types of corruption, but that the actors who benefit from corruption depends sharply on the type of government resource.
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Nuclear Russian Roulette: A Model of Proliferation and Preventive War
2018-02-23 00:00
Nuclear Russian Roulette: A Model of Proliferation and Preventive War
DateFebruary 21, 2014
Time7:00am to 8:30am
Location
11377 Bunche Hall
Contact
We (Muhammet A. Bas and Andrew J. Coe) develop a formal model of bargaining between two states, where one can invest in developing nuclear weapons and the other imperfectly observes its efforts and progress over time, and use it to analyze the occurrence of proliferation and war and the role of intelligence-gathering and estimates in these. Surprise proliferation, sporadic crises over the uncertain progress of a proliferant’s efforts, and mistaken preventive wars can all arise endogenously in the model. The technological sophistication of the proliferant and the monitoring ability of the other state influence the probabilities of war and proliferation in ways that are often counter-intuitive and non-monotonic. However, much of the variation in behavior is driven, not by these potentially policy-manipulable factors, but by chance elements such as when the proliferant’s program will make progress and when the other state will discover this. In the absence of a non-proliferation agreement, the United States and proliferants like Iran are playing what amounts to a long game of Russian roulette.
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REP Workshop with Jane Anna Gordon
2018-02-22 00:00
REP Workshop with Jane Anna Gordon
DateFebruary 19, 2015
Time12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu
Presenter:Jane Anna Gordon, University of ConnecticutTitle: “Creolizing Political Theory”About the Speaker:Jane Gordon (Ph.D. 2005, Univ. of Pennsylvania) is Associate Professor of Political Science (Political Theory) as well as of African American Studies at UConn. She previously taught at Temple University. Her focus is on modern and contemporary political theory, Africana political thought, theories of enslavement, political theories of education, methodologies in the social sciences, and political theory in film and literature. Most recently, she is the author of the like-titled book Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (2014) from Fordham University PressCo-sponsored by the Political Theory WorkshopAbstract:Asking whether it is possible to develop an approach to studying political life that fully reflects its heterogeneity, [the author] offers the creolization of political theory as a viable response. Creolization describes mixtures that were not supposed to have emerged in the plantation societies of the Caribbean but did through their capacity to exemplify living culture, thought, and political practice. In so doing, they provide a useful way of understanding similar processes that continue today, namely of one potential outcome when people who were previously strangers find themselves as unequal co-occupants of new political locations they seek to call “home.” In demonstrating a path that is different from the one usually associated with multiculturalism, in which different cultures are thought to co-exist relatively separately and the aim is for each to tolerate the other by letting it remain in relative isolation, creolization describes how people reinterpret themselves through interaction with one another to create forms of belonging that are familiar but also distinctive and new. These are useful models both for reconsidering how contemporary political solidarities could be constructed and how we might envisage the relationships that may be forged among what have become radically separate fields for studying a shared world.
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International Relations Workshop with Susan Hyde
2018-02-22 00:00
International Relations Workshop with Susan Hyde
DateFebruary 19, 2015
Time12:00pm
Location
4276 Bunche Hall
Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu
Presenter:Susan Hyde, Yale UniversityTitle:”The Individual-Level Consequences of Democracy Promotion: A Field Experiment in Rural Cambodia”About the Speaker:Susan Hyde is Associate Professor of Political Science & International Affairs at Yale University. She studies international influences on domestic politics, particularly in the developing world and teaches classes in international relations and comparative politics. Prof. Hyde is an expert on international election observation, election fraud, and democracy promotion and has served as an election observer with several organizations in Afghanistan, Albania, Indonesia, Liberia, Nicaragua, Pakistan, and Venezuela. Her first book, The Pseudo-Democrat’s Dilemma: Why Election Observation Became an International Norm (Cornell Univ. Press, 2011), won several prizes, including APSA’s 2012 Comparative Democratization Section best book award.Co-sponsored by the Comparative Politics WorkshopAbstract:Since the early 1990s, efforts to promote democracy throughout the world have proliferated, yet as many scholars and policymakers lament, the effects of these democracy promotion programs are poorly understood. In this paper we introduce a randomized field experiment intended to evaluate one democracy promotion program undertaken by an international non-governmental organization in Cambodia. We show that citizen exposure to multi-party town hall meetings has positive effects on citizen knowledge about politics, attitudes towards democracy, and reported political behavior, but has null effects on citizen confidence in the political process. In addition, several months after the intervention, qualitative evidence suggests that problem issues in treatment villages are more likely to be addressed than in control villages.
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AP Workshop - Jon Rogowski, Harvard University
2018-02-19 00:00
AP Workshop – Jon Rogowski, Harvard University
DateFebruary 13, 2017
Time12:30pm to 2:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Abstract:Though economic development is commonly posited to depend on the quality of political institutions, empirical research focuses mostly on how the nature and design of economic institutions affects developmental outcomes. We argue that infrastructural projects play a key role in shaping economic development and test our argument in the context of postal systems, one of the most important infrastructural consequences of state-building activities around the world. We find demonstrate support for our argument across micro-level analyses conducted at the county level in the United States and macro-level analyses conducted at the cross-national level. Our findings provide evidence that state-building projects, though frequently associated with pork-barrel politics, patronage, and corruption, provided important sources of economic development for recipient communities.Full paper can be found here
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IR Workshop - Lauren Prather, UC San Diego
2018-02-19 00:00
IR Workshop – Lauren Prather, UC San Diego
DateFebruary 13, 2017
Time3:00pm to 4:30pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Abstract:What explains variation in individual preferences for foreign economic engagement? Although much ink has been spilled on that question, little research examines how potential partner countries affect public opinion on policies such as trade, foreign aid, and foreign direct investment. We construct a new theory arguing that citizens’ perceptions of political side-taking by outside powers shape their support for engaging economically with those countries. We use original survey experiments fielded in a developed country, the United States, and a developing country, Tunisia, to test the theory. In both cases, we find that the potential partners’ side-taking in the partisan politics of the respondents’ country dramatically shapes support for foreign economic relations with other countries along partisan lines. As the rise of new aid donors, investors, and trade partners create new choices in economic partners, the theory and findings contained in this article are critical to understanding mass preferences about open economic engagement.
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PT Workshop - Sankar Muthu, University of Chicago
2018-02-16 00:00
PT Workshop – Sankar Muthu, University of Chicago
DateFebruary 10, 2017
Time4:00pm to 6:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
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IL/IR Workshop - Laurence Helfer
2018-02-16 00:00
IL/IR Workshop – Laurence Helfer
DateFebruary 12, 2016
Time2:00pm to 4:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
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PT Workshop - Jeanne Morefield
2018-02-16 00:00
PT Workshop – Jeanne Morefield
DateFebruary 12, 2016
Time4:00pm to 6:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
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IR Workshop - Rachel Stein, George Washington University
2018-02-12 00:00
IR Workshop – Rachel Stein, George Washington University
DateFebruary 6, 2017
Time3:00pm to 4:30pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Abstract:Public perceptions of threat from abroad can have an important impact on the course of both domestic and foreign policy, but how do ordinary people, who lack both the access to information and the political sophistication of elite actors, assess the source and severity of foreign threats? In this paper, I argue that media coverage, and particularly the propensity of the media to personify foreign adversaries plays an important role in threat perception at the mass level. Personification refers to the use of specific individuals, usually leaders, to stand in for more abstract entities like states or terrorist groups. Given the media’s reliance on visual imagery to attract and keep the attention of viewers, personification often involves widespread dissemination of the image of the enemy leader. In turn, these images have the power to influence threat perception by activating out-group stereotypes concerning violence and trustworthiness. Using a survey experiment, I show how the perception of threat is influenced by an interaction between the preexisting biases of the individual viewer and the stereotypicality of the image itself. While preliminary, these results suggest that the enemy images that individuals encounter in the course of their media consumption may play an important role in shaping mass attitudes towards both the use of military force abroad, and the dehumanization, repression and mistreatment of minority groups at home. Full paper can be found here
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CP Workshop - Jessica Gottlieb, Texas A&M University
2018-02-12 00:00
CP Workshop – Jessica Gottlieb, Texas A&M University
DateFebruary 6, 2017
Time12:30pm to 2:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Abstract: Contrary to much of the empirical literature, we find that increases in political competition in one new democracy actually decrease the provision of publicly-provided goods. This result is not especially surprising in light of the widespread consensus that parties in new democracies often campaign on clientelistic transfers – which can be a substitute for programmatic outcomes. However, we find no evidence that this is driving the negative result in our empirical context of Mali. Instead, we find evidence for a novel mechanism: an increased likelihood of coordination failures among elected local councilmembers in more competitive districts. We develop a model that generates predictions about when the coordination costs induced by political competition are likely to result in worse publicly-provided goods outcomes: namely, when competition increases coordination costs at a relatively faster rate than it decreases political rent-seeking. In-depth interviews with local politicians inform our theory, while panel data on local publicly-provided goods provision and election outcomes and a large-scale phone survey of politicians allow for a rigorous test of the impacts of competition on publicly-provided goods outcomes and of the mechanisms driving these impacts. We expect coordination failures to be important in many contexts where local policymaking requires the engagement of a broad coalition of potentially diverse actors and where governance is relatively non-transparent.Full paper can be found here
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IR Workshop- Rachel Wellhausen
2018-02-12 00:00
IR Workshop- Rachel Wellhausen
DateFebruary 8, 2016
Time12:00pm to 2:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
There is extraordinary variation in how governments treat multinational corporations in emerging market countries. Governments around the world have nationalized, expropriated, or eaten away at the value of foreign-owned property in violation of international treaties. This is despite the fact that we expect, at a minimum, that governments in poor countries will respect the contracts they make with foreign firms lest foreign capital flee. In The Shield of Nationality, I introduce foreign firm nationality as a key determinant of which firms take flight or fight when a government breaks contracts. Firms of the same nationality are likely to worry that their co-national’s broken contract is a forewarning of their own problems. This sense of shared political risk has two effects. First, firms of the same nationality lobby their diplomats to shield them from breach. Second, firms of the same nationality are likely to divert their investments when the shield is pierced and a co-national firm faces a broken contract. In contrast, firms of other nationalities have less incentive to risk their defenses and are more likely to meet the broken contract with apparent indifference. The theory’s counterintuitive implication is that a nationally diverse investor community can be a liability to firms while providing an opening for governments to prioritize other goals over the property and preferences of foreign capital. My evidence for these findings includes cross-national quantitative analyses and case studies that draw on field research in Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine.
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Methods Workshop - Groeling/Li/Zhu
2018-02-12 00:00
Methods Workshop – Groeling/Li/Zhu
DateFebruary 8, 2016
Time3:30pm to 5:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Media news plays a vital role in informing citizens, affecting public opinion, and influencing policy making. The flow of information in society is an important topic in social and political science research, but the sheer volume of news data has made manual analysis exceptionally difficult. In this talk, we will present a joint project on joint image-text parsing, including news story segmentation, topic detection, clustering, and tracking with a hierarchical statistical model called And-Or Graph. Detected topics can show a comprehensive interpretation of the related news events, and topic trajectories can reveal how topics evolve over time. Together, these tools provide an automatic news parsing solution to feed further analysis. This information is further combined with sentiment analysis in tweets.Then we will show two case studies: (i) tracking the 2016 U.S. presidential election; and (ii) analyzing gun violence events. We have built a website (viz2016.com) to present accessible visual summaries of our large-scale election tracking results. We will introduce the website in this talk and show how to use the data. For the gun violence case study, we will discuss our topic tracking and sentiment analysis results. We will also talk about our automated analyses of news visuals, including communicative intent inference and facial trait judgement. These analyses show how news media leverage images to visually persuade their audiences, and demonstrate the social dimensions of faces and their impact on real-world events.Finally, we will discuss the next steps for the project, including our newly-launched effort to begin digitizing local and national television news content dating back to 1970s. This is a joint work since 2010 between communications studies (Tim Groeling, Francis Steen) and Statistics/Computer Science (Weixin Li, Tao Yuan, Jungseock Joo, and Song-Chun Zhu), sponsored by the NSF CDI program CNS 1028381.
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Comparative Politics Workshop with Lisa Blaydes
2018-02-12 00:00
Comparative Politics Workshop with Lisa Blaydes
DateFebruary 9, 2015
Time12:30pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu
Presenter:Lisa Blaydes, Stanford UniversityTitle: “Compliance and Resistance in Iraq under Saddam Hussein: Evidence from the Files of the Ba`th Party”Abstract:What explains patterns of compliance with and resistance to autocratic rule? This paper provides a theoretical framework for understanding how individuals living under dictatorship calibrate their political behaviors. Using data from documents captured by U.S. forces during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I use unanticipated political shocks to examine over-time discontinuities in citizen behavior in Iraq under Saddam Hussein during two distinct periods – before and after the First Gulf War and the associated Kurdish and Shi`a anti-regime uprisings. Prior to 1991 and the establishment of a Kurdish autonomous zone in northern Iraq, severe repression and widespread use of collective punishment created the conditions for Iraqi Kurds to engage in a widespread anti-regime rebellion. Before 1991, Shi`a Iraqis were able to express limited forms of political discontent; after 1991, however, Shi`a were forced to publicly signal compliance while shifting to more private forms of anti-regime activity. While Iraqis living in and around Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit almost universally self-identified as Ba`thists and enjoyed privileges as a result of close ties to the regime, Sunnis living in areas distant from Tikrit became increasingly estranged from the regime as international sanctions closed off economic opportunities.
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Cristina Beltran, New York University
2018-02-08 00:00
Cristina Beltran, New York University
DateFebruary 2, 2017
Time12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Abstract:From Brexit to the election of Donald Trump, our politics are increasingly defined by anxieties over the meaning and limits of sovereignty. This paper argues for placing Latinos at the center of our racial analysis in order to better understand how concerns and dreams regarding sovereign power are shaping American public life. Focusing on the split between neoliberal multiculturalism and right-wing nativism, this research puts conservative critiques of immigration alongside examples of undocumented activism to explore the fundamental yet contradictory role Latinos occupy in the U.S. political imaginary, positioned within American democracy as both political necessity and demographic threat. Drawing on an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that includes Latino studies, political theory, and queer theory, this paper analyzes how Latinos’ rapid growth nationally has produced a potent combination of political desire and hostility, giving Latinos a distinct (and affectively charged) status within America’s political culture. In this way, Latinos negotiate a political climate in which their political actions are often perceived as indicative of sovereignty’s crisis.
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Comparative Politics Workshop with James Kung
2018-02-08 00:00
Comparative Politics Workshop with James Kung
DateFebruary 5, 2015
Time12:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu
Presenter:
James Kai-sing Kung, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Title:
“Do Land Revenue Windfalls Create a Political Resource Curse? Evidence from China”
Abstract: By analyzing a panel on the political turnovers of 4,390 county leaders in China during 1999–2008, we find that the revenue windfalls accrued to these officials from land sales have both undermined the effectiveness of the promotion system for government officials and fueled corruption. Instead of rewarding efforts made to boost GDP growth, promotion is also positively correlated with signaling efforts, with those politically connected to their superiors and those beyond the prime age for promotion being the primary beneficiaries. Likewise, land revenue windfalls have led to increases in the size of bureaucracy and administrative expenditure –|corruption in short.
Paper:
Click here to download.
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American Politics Workshop with Anthony Fowler
2018-02-05 00:00
American Politics Workshop with Anthony Fowler
DateFebruary 2, 2015
Time3:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu
Presenter:Anthony Fowler, University of ChicagoTitle:”A Bayesian Explanation for Incumbency Advantage”Abstract: Incumbents perform significantly better in elections just because they are incumbents, yet the most commonly proposed explanations for this phenomenon are unsatisfying and inconsistent with empirical evidence. First, I review previous evidence and introduce new data to demonstrate that previous explanations are unlikely to account for the incumbency advantage, its changes over time, or its consistency across offices. Next, I introduce a new explanation that is parsimonious and consistent with existing empirical evidence. If voters lack perfect information about candidates in an election, incumbency is an informative signal of quality, and voters will update their beliefs accordingly — producing an incumbency advantage where low-quality incumbents who barely win office receive a significant electoral bump in support because of their incumbency status. These claims are formalized through a decision-theoretic model where voters receive noisy signals of candidate quality. Finally, I experimentally test this explanation by providing voters with information that removes the informative value of incumbency—their incumbent’s vote margin in the last election. When voters learn that their incumbent barely won office, they are significantly less likely to support reelection. The results suggest that this simple theory of Bayesian learning explains a meaningful portion of the observed incumbency advantage in American elections. I conclude by discussing the ways in which this explanation can explain the dramatic rise of incumbency advantage in the last half of the 20th century, variation in incumbency advantage across countries, and even a negative incumbency advantage in some contexts.
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International Relations Workshop with Michaela Mattes
2018-02-05 00:00
International Relations Workshop with Michaela Mattes
DateFebruary 2, 2015
Time12:30pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu
Presenter:Michaela Mattes, UC BerkeleyTitle: “Chipping Away at the Issues: Does a Piecemeal Approach to Dispute Settlement Work?”Abstract:Disputants often have the option to resolve their disagreements in a series of partial settlements, addressing a subset of the issues at a time. How viable is such a piecemeal strategy? I argue that partial settlements can decrease tensions, build trust, generate demands for additional cooperation, and provide guidance for future negotiations. As a result, partial settlements should reduce conflict and facilitate the resolution of remaining disagreements. Yet, some scholars have raised doubts about the efficacy of partial settlements and a systematic empirical test is necessary to determine whether a piecemeal approach works. Using data from worldwide interstate territorial claims between 1919-2001, I find that partial settlements do not initially have a conflict-dampening effect, but that they promote the resolution of remaining contentious issues and thus help reduce conflict in the longer run. While not a panacea, partial settlements can be a valuable conflict management tool.Paper:Click here to download.
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Protecting the Polls: The Effect of Observers on Election Fraud
2018-02-05 00:00
Protecting the Polls: The Effect of Observers on Election Fraud
DateFebruary 3, 2014
Time4:00am to 5:30am
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Do domestic election observers deter electoral fraud? And under what conditions do political parties respond to the presence of observers to negate their impact? We address these questions by studying observers’ effects on two markers of fraud — overvoting (more votes cast than registered voters) and unnaturally high levels of turnout — during Ghana’s 2012 presidential elections. Our randomized saturation experimental design allows us to estimate observers’ causal effects and to identify how political parties strategically respond to observers. We show that observers significantly reduce overvoting and suspicious turnout at polling stations to which they are deployed. We also find that political parties successfully relocate fraud from observed to unobserved stations in their historical strongholds, where they enjoy social penetration and political competition is low, whereas they are not able to do so in politically competitive constituencies. The findings have implications for understanding political party behavior and the effects of governance interventions.
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PT Workshop - Megan Thomas, UC Santa Cruz
2018-02-02 00:00
PT Workshop – Megan Thomas, UC Santa Cruz
DateJanuary 27, 2017
Time4:00pm to 6:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
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Explaining Authoritarian Collapse through Public Opinion Surveys: Evidence from Poland (1985-1989)
2018-02-02 00:00
Explaining Authoritarian Collapse through Public Opinion Surveys: Evidence from Poland (1985-1989)
DateJanuary 31, 2014
Time6:00am to 7:30am
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
In this paper we take advantage of a unique set of surveys from late-communist Poland to address the question how anti-communist attitudes developed in the years leading up to the fall of communism in East-Central Europe. We use several surveys carried out on representative national samples in Poland between 1985 (one year after the end of Martial Law) and 1989 to examine the correlates of dissident attitudes among the mass public. The surveys were carried out by the Center for Public Opinion Research (CBOS), a polling company created by the communist authorities in the aftermath of the rise of the dissident trade union Solidarity, when they realized that relying on reports from the secret police alone left them unprepared for outbreaks of popular dissidence. We exploit the variation in the authoritarian context –from the restrictive post-Martial law regime through gradual liberalization to the relatively tolerant pre-roundtable negotiations environment—to show that, contrary to Timur Kuran’s theory, a decrease in pro-government attitudes does not immediately translate into an increase inpro-opposition attitudes. Instead, there is a considerable lag between the expression of pro-government and pro-opposition attitudes, at least at the aggregate level. We use significant events from recent Polish and European political history to interpret this gap. Additionally, we correct for the possibility of bias in answering questions about the authoritarian regime sincerely by using a question about Solidarity membership during the period when it was a legal organization to develop weights allowing us to distinguish between the more and less sincere respondents.
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The Political Polarization of America’s Physicians
2018-02-02 00:00
The Political Polarization of America’s Physicians
DateJanuary 31, 2014
Time8:00am to 9:30am
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Click here to download the presentation slides (paper not available): http://www.polisci.ucla.edu/workshops/speaker-series-papers/Doctors_UCLA_JAN_2014.pptx
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REP Workshop with Christopher Lebron
2018-02-01 00:00
REP Workshop with Christopher Lebron
DateJanuary 29, 2015
Time12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu
Race, Ethnicity, and Politics WorkshopPresenter:Christopher Lebron, Yale UniversityTitle: “The Sense and Sensibility of Equality”About the Speaker:Christopher Lebron is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Philosophy.Abstract:Theories of justice have typically focused on the question of institutional design, as informed by a particular moral argument, to effect social justice. In this paper, part of a larger book project, I focus on the themes of moral skill and attentiveness to present a framework outlining the kinds of personal ethical and moral attributes and habits persons need to cultivate in order to comply with the demands of racial justice.Paper:Click here to download.To preview Prof. Lebron’s REP Workshop from an earlier presentation, click here.
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Comparative Politics Workshop with Kenneth Scheve
2018-01-31 00:00
Comparative Politics Workshop with Kenneth Scheve
DateJanuary 28, 2015
Time12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu
Presenter:Kenneth Scheve, Stanford UniversityTitle:”Taxing the Rich: Fairness and Fiscal Sacrifice Over Two Centuries”About the Presenter:Kenneth Scheve is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute. His research has been published in numerous leading scholarly journals and has been recognized for a number of awards and grants. Prof. Scheve is currently writing a book (Taxing the Rich . . . ) with David Stasavage of New York University examining the interaction between mass warfare, fairness concerns, and the development of progressive taxation in the 19th and 20th centuries across twenty countries. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and his B.A. from the University of Notre Dame, and previously taught at the University of Michigan and Yale University.
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Saumitra Jha, Stanford University
2018-01-30 00:00
Saumitra Jha, Stanford University
DateJanuary 24, 2017
Time12:30pm to 2:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Abstract:Financial markets expose individuals to the broader economy. Does participation in financial markets also lead citizens to re-evaluate the costs of conflict, their views on politics and even their voting decisions? Prior to the 2015 Israeli elections, we randomly assigned financial assets from Israeli and Palestinian companies to likely voters and gave them incentives to actively trade for up to seven weeks. Exposure to financial markets systematically shifted vote choices and increased support for peace initiatives. We delineate the mechanisms for this change and show that financial market exposure led to learning and reevaluation of the economic costs of conflict.Full paper available here:https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2716660
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