Punishing Camp Protesters based on ideology
Recent protests on university campuses have inspired conservative claims that liberals allow partisanship to colour their judgement of disorderly activists. Prior research suggests, however, that both ideologies are prone to political bias. Furthermore, because conservatives are typically more concerned with orderliness and authority, there are theoretical reasons to expect conservatives to respond more forcefully to protests than liberals, especially when those protesters are political opponents. Using an experimental design with two samples, one with Mechanical Turk participants and the other with current college students, the study finds support for the hypotheses that (1) conservatives are more punitive towards protesters than liberals, (2) both ideologies are more likely to punish when protesters are their political opponents, and (3) conservatives’ responses to protesters are more sensitive to their ideology than liberals’. These results support recent studies of the psychology of political ideology and punitiveness.
Research and Politics, January 2020 (The Netherlands)
Fridays of Revolution: Focal Days and Mass Protest in Egypt and Tunisia
Focal days of protest are increasingly common to episodes of revolutionary mobilization. This paper explores the significance of focal days in patterning sustained protest in Egypt and Tunisia from 2011 to 2012. In Egypt, resource-poor activists exploited the confluence of worshippers on Fridays to mobilize mass transitory protest. This reliance on ritualized action hindered cross-sectoral coordination and meant mass protest often failed to inflict a direct economic cost. In Tunisia, there was no focal day of protest, in large part due to the coordinating hand of trade unions. In consequence, mass protest was more likely to span multiple sites, sectors, and tactics. These results suggest that oppositions can sustain mass mobilization even absent organizational capacity, but a reliance on a focal day limits the potential of protest over a political transition. Supplementary analyses point to the applicability of our findings to a number of other Arab Spring countries.
Political Research Quarterly, December 2019 (The US)
Introduction: Women, Gender, and Change in Africa
The scholarship on women and gender in Africa has shown that women’s political, social, and economic experiences are often fundamentally distinct from men’s. Feminist and non-feminist scholarship has found that gender is a key factor in explaining this difference. However, the concept of gender and its use in the study of politics and society in Africa have been subject to debate, generating new insights into the topic. The articles in this virtual issue contribute to this literature by demonstrating the mutability of gender relations and by theorizing the links with major political and social phenomena including colonization, migration, and armed conflict.
African Affairs, November 2019
Institutions, informality, and influence: explaining nuclear cooperation in the Australia-US alliance
Nuclear cooperation has been a consistent feature of the Australia-US alliance. In the 1950s and 1960s, Canberra explored transferring US nuclear weapons to Australian forces operating in Southeast Asia. Since the 1960s, Australian governments have supported hosting joint facilities that contribute to America’s ability to execute global nuclear operations. And Australia has regularly invoked the nuclear umbrella as part of the alliance. We explain the key sources of nuclear cooperation in the alliance by leveraging realist and institutionalist theories of alliance cooperation. While realism explains limits to US nuclear commitments in the 1950s, institutional explanations are more relevant in pinpointing the sources of nuclear cooperation and in explaining why Australia has often achieved its policy preferences as the junior partner.
Australian Journal of Political Science, December 2019
The cost of presidential impeachment to politically connected firms
This study examines the ways political events can affect the stock prices of politically connected firms by studying one of the biggest corruption scandals in modern South Korean history, which led to the first-ever impeachment of a sitting president. We analysed the stock returns of firms that donated money to foundations allegedly controlled by the president’s confidante. We found that the abnormal stock returns of politically connected firms decreased when the president was removed from office. Using tick-by-tick stock price data, we were able to pinpoint the exact moments when the stock prices of firms that donated money fluctuated, as the president’s fate was determined by the justices of the Constitutional Court.
Japanese Journal of Political Science, October 2019
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