Does US public opinion on international affairs affect political elites’ policy preferences? Most... more Does US public opinion on international affairs affect political elites’ policy preferences? Most research assumes that political elites do indeed consider public opinion in their decision-making process. However, this key assumption is difficult to test empirically given limited research access to political elites. We examine elite responsiveness to public opinion on sanctioning Russia during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. We fielded a pre-registered experiment within the 2022/23 TRIP survey of US foreign policy practitioners, offering a rare opportunity for a fairly large elite survey experiment (n = 253) with important policy actors who have not been studied in this context. We used current public polling highly supportive of increasing sanctions as an information treatment. Our research design, involving a highly salient real-world issue and treatment, substantially expands on previous work. Exposure to the treatment raises elite support for increasing sanctions from 68.0...
In empirical research, scholars can choose between an exploratory causes-of-effects analysis, a c... more In empirical research, scholars can choose between an exploratory causes-of-effects analysis, a confirmatory effects-of-causes approach, or a mechanism-of-effects analysis that can be either exploratory or confirmatory. Understanding the choice between the approaches is important for two reasons. First, the added value of each approach depends on how much is known about the phenomenon of interest at the time of the analysis. Second, because of the specializations of methods, there are benefits to a division of labor between researchers who have expertise in the application of a given method. In this preregistered study, we test two hypotheses that follow from these arguments. We theorize that exploratory research is chosen when little is known about a phenomenon and a confirmatory approach is taken when more knowledge is available. A complementary hypothesis is that quantitative researchers opt for confirmatory designs and qualitative researchers for exploration because of their academic socialization. We test the hypotheses with a survey experiment of more than 900 political scientists from the United States and Europe. The results indicate that the state of knowledge has a significant and sizeable effect on the choice of the approach. In contrast, the evidence about the effect of methods expertise is more ambivalent.
The United Nations use Security Council resolutions to attribute responsibility for issues of wor... more The United Nations use Security Council resolutions to attribute responsibility for issues of world politics either to itself or to other actors. In this article, we analyze the development of responsibility attribution over time. We evaluate whether the end of the Cold War and initiatives such as the Agenda for Peace and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) influenced the prevalence of responsibility attribution in Security Council resolutions. The analysis is based on a dataset covering all resolutions published between 1946 and 2015. Using methods of quantitative text and time series analysis we document an increase of responsibility attributions through resolutions over time. However, this increase is not clearly attributable to initiatives such as the Agenda and the R2P
Research suggests that nonviolent resistance (NVR) campaigns are more successful in deposing dict... more Research suggests that nonviolent resistance (NVR) campaigns are more successful in deposing dictators than armed rebellions. However, ousting dictators is only the first step in the process of democratization. After deposing an autocratic regime, societies enter a transition phase where they must learn to consolidate the gains of democracy and bargain about the new rules of the democratic regime. But even if free, fair, and competitive elections are held, indicating a successful transition to democratic rule, uncertainty about its stability remains salient. In the period that follows, either democracy survives and proves to be resilient, or an autocratic backslide occurs. In this article, we analyze the effect of NVR campaigns on the survival of democratic regimes. Building on the literature on modes of transitions and nonviolent resistance, we argue that those democratic regimes that come into being as a result of a NVR campaign are less prone to democratic breakdown. The main mechanism which produces this effect is that the organizational culture of NVR campaigns spills over to the subsequent democratic regime fostering conditions favorable for democratic survival. We test the effect of NVR campaigns on democratic regime survival using survival analysis and propensity score matching. The results show that democratic regimes that experience NVR during the transition phase survive substantially longer than regimes without NVR.
Um die Ausbreitung des Coronavirus einzudämmen, haben zahlreiche Länder weltweit die Versammlungs... more Um die Ausbreitung des Coronavirus einzudämmen, haben zahlreiche Länder weltweit die Versammlungsfreiheit durch Ausgangssperren oder ähnliche Maßnahmen (wie z. B. die deutsche „Kontaktsperre“) zeitweise vollständig suspendiert. Nach Angaben des COVID-19 Civic Freedom Tracker hatten bis Mitte Juni 2020 insgesamt 86 Länder in der einen oder anderen Form einen Notstand ausgerufen, 35 Länder hatten Einschränkungen der Meinungsfreiheit und 112 Länder Einschränkungen der Versammlungsfreiheit erlassen (ICNL/ECNL 2020). Generell herrschte in den meisten Gesellschaften zunächst weitgehende Einigkeit darüber, dass strikte Maßnahmen der „sozialen Distanzierung“ temporär nötig sind, um Leben zu retten und die öffentlichen Gesundheitssysteme vor dem Kollaps zu bewahren. Auch Menschenrechtsorganisationen wie Human Rights Watch (2020a) und Amnesty International (2020) betonten, dass selbst drastische Einschränkungen der Menschenrechte und die Ausrufung von Ausnahmezuständen legitime Reaktionen auf die Corona-Pandemie sein können. Nach dem Internationalen Pakt über wirtschaftliche, soziale und kulturelle Rechte, der „das Recht eines jeden auf das für ihn erreichbare Höchstmaß an körperlicher und geistiger Gesundheit“ beinhaltet, sind die Regierungen in der Tat dazu verpflichtet, epidemische, endemische, Berufsund sonstige Krankheiten zu verhindern, zu behandeln und zu bekämpfen (Vereinte Nationen 1966).
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments across the globe implemented severe r... more During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments across the globe implemented severe restrictions of civic freedoms to contain the spread of the virus. The global health emergency posed the risk of governments seizing the pandemic as a window of opportunity to curb (potential) challenges to their power, thereby reinforcing the ongoing, worldwide trend of shrinking civic spaces. In this article, we investigate whether and how governments used the pandemic as a justification to impose restrictions of freedom of expression. Drawing on the scholarship on the causes of civic space restrictions, we argue that governments responded to COVID-19 by curtailing the freedom of expression when they had faced significant contentious political challenges before the pandemic. Our results from a quantitative analysis indeed show that countries who experienced high levels of pro-democracy mobilization before the onset of the pandemic were more likely to see restrictions of the freedom of expression relative to countries with no or low levels of mobilization. Additional three brief case studies (Algeria, Bolivia and India) illustrate the process of how pre-pandemic mass protests fostered the imposition of restrictions on the freedom of expression during the pandemic.
Um die Ausbreitung des Coronavirus einzudämmen, haben zahlreiche Länder weltweit die Versammlungs... more Um die Ausbreitung des Coronavirus einzudämmen, haben zahlreiche Länder weltweit die Versammlungsfreiheit durch Ausgangssperren oder ähnliche Maßnahmen (wie z. B. die deutsche „Kontaktsperre“) zeitweise vollständig suspendiert. Nach Angaben des COVID-19 Civic Freedom Tracker hatten bis Mitte Juni 2020 insgesamt 86 Länder in der einen oder anderen Form einen Notstand ausgerufen, 35 Länder hatten Einschränkungen der Meinungsfreiheit und 112 Länder Einschränkungen der Versammlungsfreiheit erlassen (ICNL/ECNL 2020). Generell herrschte in den meisten Gesellschaften zunächst weitgehende Einigkeit darüber, dass strikte Maßnahmen der „sozialen Distanzierung“ temporär nötig sind, um Leben zu retten und die öffentlichen Gesundheitssysteme vor dem Kollaps zu bewahren. Auch Menschenrechtsorganisationen wie Human Rights Watch (2020a) und Amnesty International (2020) betonten, dass selbst drastische Einschränkungen der Menschenrechte und die Ausrufung von Ausnahmezuständen legitime Reaktionen auf die Corona-Pandemie sein können. Nach dem Internationalen Pakt über wirtschaftliche, soziale und kulturelle Rechte, der „das Recht eines jeden auf das für ihn erreichbare Höchstmaß an körperlicher und geistiger Gesundheit“ beinhaltet, sind die Regierungen in der Tat dazu verpflichtet, epidemische, endemische, Berufsund sonstige Krankheiten zu verhindern, zu behandeln und zu bekämpfen (Vereinte Nationen 1966).
The United Nations use Security Council resolutions to attribute responsibility for issues of wor... more The United Nations use Security Council resolutions to attribute responsibility for issues of world politics either to itself or to other actors. In this article, we analyze the development of responsibility attribution over time. We evaluate whether the end of the Cold War and initiatives such as the Agenda for Peace and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) influenced the prevalence of responsibility attribution in Security Council resolutions. The analysis is based on a dataset covering all resolutions published between 1946 and 2015. Using methods of quantitative text and time series analysis we document an increase of responsibility attributions through resolutions over time. However, this increase is not clearly attributable to initiatives such as the Agenda and the R2P
Supplemental material, Replication_files for Non-violent resistance and the quality of democracy ... more Supplemental material, Replication_files for Non-violent resistance and the quality of democracy by Felix S Bethke and Jonathan Pinckney in Conflict Management and Peace Science
Supplemental material, CMP855918_Appendix for Non-violent resistance and the quality of democracy... more Supplemental material, CMP855918_Appendix for Non-violent resistance and the quality of democracy by Felix S Bethke and Jonathan Pinckney in Conflict Management and Peace Science
Zeitschrift für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung, 2020
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of countries worldwide have introduced severe li... more In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of countries worldwide have introduced severe limitations on the freedom of assembly, if not an outright lockdown, in many cases complemented by restrictions on further civil and political rights. Although restrictions were generally considered necessary to save lives and protect health care systems from overburdening, they also pose the risk of government overreach, that is, governments may use the pandemic as a convenient opportunity and justification to impose restrictions for political purposes. In this sense, COVID-19 may give yet another substantial boost to a global trend that has been unfolding since the early 2000s: the shrinking of civic spaces, which is characterized by an increase in government restrictions that target civil society actors and limit their freedoms of assembly, association, and expression. The aim of the paper is to assess civic space restrictions that have been imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic ...
Previous research has shown that successful non-violent resistance (NVR) campaigns promote democr... more Previous research has shown that successful non-violent resistance (NVR) campaigns promote democracy compared with violent revolutions and top-down liberalization. However, research to date has not examined the character and quality of the democratic regimes following NVR campaigns, or evaluated the mechanisms that produce this effect. In this paper, we address this gap by analyzing the effect of NVR on the quality of democracy, using the Polyarchy index from the Varieties of Democracies project and its sub-components: (1) elected executive; (2) free and fair elections; (3) freedom of expression; (4) associational autonomy; and (5) inclusive citizenship. Using kernel matching and differences-in-differences estimation we find that initiating a democratic transition through NVR improves democratic quality after transition significantly and substantially relative to cases without this characteristic. Our analysis of the Polyarchy index’s sub-components reveals that this positive effect...
Does US public opinion on international affairs affect political elites’ policy preferences? Most... more Does US public opinion on international affairs affect political elites’ policy preferences? Most research assumes that political elites do indeed consider public opinion in their decision-making process. However, this key assumption is difficult to test empirically given limited research access to political elites. We examine elite responsiveness to public opinion on sanctioning Russia during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. We fielded a pre-registered experiment within the 2022/23 TRIP survey of US foreign policy practitioners, offering a rare opportunity for a fairly large elite survey experiment (n = 253) with important policy actors who have not been studied in this context. We used current public polling highly supportive of increasing sanctions as an information treatment. Our research design, involving a highly salient real-world issue and treatment, substantially expands on previous work. Exposure to the treatment raises elite support for increasing sanctions from 68.0...
In empirical research, scholars can choose between an exploratory causes-of-effects analysis, a c... more In empirical research, scholars can choose between an exploratory causes-of-effects analysis, a confirmatory effects-of-causes approach, or a mechanism-of-effects analysis that can be either exploratory or confirmatory. Understanding the choice between the approaches is important for two reasons. First, the added value of each approach depends on how much is known about the phenomenon of interest at the time of the analysis. Second, because of the specializations of methods, there are benefits to a division of labor between researchers who have expertise in the application of a given method. In this preregistered study, we test two hypotheses that follow from these arguments. We theorize that exploratory research is chosen when little is known about a phenomenon and a confirmatory approach is taken when more knowledge is available. A complementary hypothesis is that quantitative researchers opt for confirmatory designs and qualitative researchers for exploration because of their academic socialization. We test the hypotheses with a survey experiment of more than 900 political scientists from the United States and Europe. The results indicate that the state of knowledge has a significant and sizeable effect on the choice of the approach. In contrast, the evidence about the effect of methods expertise is more ambivalent.
The United Nations use Security Council resolutions to attribute responsibility for issues of wor... more The United Nations use Security Council resolutions to attribute responsibility for issues of world politics either to itself or to other actors. In this article, we analyze the development of responsibility attribution over time. We evaluate whether the end of the Cold War and initiatives such as the Agenda for Peace and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) influenced the prevalence of responsibility attribution in Security Council resolutions. The analysis is based on a dataset covering all resolutions published between 1946 and 2015. Using methods of quantitative text and time series analysis we document an increase of responsibility attributions through resolutions over time. However, this increase is not clearly attributable to initiatives such as the Agenda and the R2P
Research suggests that nonviolent resistance (NVR) campaigns are more successful in deposing dict... more Research suggests that nonviolent resistance (NVR) campaigns are more successful in deposing dictators than armed rebellions. However, ousting dictators is only the first step in the process of democratization. After deposing an autocratic regime, societies enter a transition phase where they must learn to consolidate the gains of democracy and bargain about the new rules of the democratic regime. But even if free, fair, and competitive elections are held, indicating a successful transition to democratic rule, uncertainty about its stability remains salient. In the period that follows, either democracy survives and proves to be resilient, or an autocratic backslide occurs. In this article, we analyze the effect of NVR campaigns on the survival of democratic regimes. Building on the literature on modes of transitions and nonviolent resistance, we argue that those democratic regimes that come into being as a result of a NVR campaign are less prone to democratic breakdown. The main mechanism which produces this effect is that the organizational culture of NVR campaigns spills over to the subsequent democratic regime fostering conditions favorable for democratic survival. We test the effect of NVR campaigns on democratic regime survival using survival analysis and propensity score matching. The results show that democratic regimes that experience NVR during the transition phase survive substantially longer than regimes without NVR.
Um die Ausbreitung des Coronavirus einzudämmen, haben zahlreiche Länder weltweit die Versammlungs... more Um die Ausbreitung des Coronavirus einzudämmen, haben zahlreiche Länder weltweit die Versammlungsfreiheit durch Ausgangssperren oder ähnliche Maßnahmen (wie z. B. die deutsche „Kontaktsperre“) zeitweise vollständig suspendiert. Nach Angaben des COVID-19 Civic Freedom Tracker hatten bis Mitte Juni 2020 insgesamt 86 Länder in der einen oder anderen Form einen Notstand ausgerufen, 35 Länder hatten Einschränkungen der Meinungsfreiheit und 112 Länder Einschränkungen der Versammlungsfreiheit erlassen (ICNL/ECNL 2020). Generell herrschte in den meisten Gesellschaften zunächst weitgehende Einigkeit darüber, dass strikte Maßnahmen der „sozialen Distanzierung“ temporär nötig sind, um Leben zu retten und die öffentlichen Gesundheitssysteme vor dem Kollaps zu bewahren. Auch Menschenrechtsorganisationen wie Human Rights Watch (2020a) und Amnesty International (2020) betonten, dass selbst drastische Einschränkungen der Menschenrechte und die Ausrufung von Ausnahmezuständen legitime Reaktionen auf die Corona-Pandemie sein können. Nach dem Internationalen Pakt über wirtschaftliche, soziale und kulturelle Rechte, der „das Recht eines jeden auf das für ihn erreichbare Höchstmaß an körperlicher und geistiger Gesundheit“ beinhaltet, sind die Regierungen in der Tat dazu verpflichtet, epidemische, endemische, Berufsund sonstige Krankheiten zu verhindern, zu behandeln und zu bekämpfen (Vereinte Nationen 1966).
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments across the globe implemented severe r... more During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments across the globe implemented severe restrictions of civic freedoms to contain the spread of the virus. The global health emergency posed the risk of governments seizing the pandemic as a window of opportunity to curb (potential) challenges to their power, thereby reinforcing the ongoing, worldwide trend of shrinking civic spaces. In this article, we investigate whether and how governments used the pandemic as a justification to impose restrictions of freedom of expression. Drawing on the scholarship on the causes of civic space restrictions, we argue that governments responded to COVID-19 by curtailing the freedom of expression when they had faced significant contentious political challenges before the pandemic. Our results from a quantitative analysis indeed show that countries who experienced high levels of pro-democracy mobilization before the onset of the pandemic were more likely to see restrictions of the freedom of expression relative to countries with no or low levels of mobilization. Additional three brief case studies (Algeria, Bolivia and India) illustrate the process of how pre-pandemic mass protests fostered the imposition of restrictions on the freedom of expression during the pandemic.
Um die Ausbreitung des Coronavirus einzudämmen, haben zahlreiche Länder weltweit die Versammlungs... more Um die Ausbreitung des Coronavirus einzudämmen, haben zahlreiche Länder weltweit die Versammlungsfreiheit durch Ausgangssperren oder ähnliche Maßnahmen (wie z. B. die deutsche „Kontaktsperre“) zeitweise vollständig suspendiert. Nach Angaben des COVID-19 Civic Freedom Tracker hatten bis Mitte Juni 2020 insgesamt 86 Länder in der einen oder anderen Form einen Notstand ausgerufen, 35 Länder hatten Einschränkungen der Meinungsfreiheit und 112 Länder Einschränkungen der Versammlungsfreiheit erlassen (ICNL/ECNL 2020). Generell herrschte in den meisten Gesellschaften zunächst weitgehende Einigkeit darüber, dass strikte Maßnahmen der „sozialen Distanzierung“ temporär nötig sind, um Leben zu retten und die öffentlichen Gesundheitssysteme vor dem Kollaps zu bewahren. Auch Menschenrechtsorganisationen wie Human Rights Watch (2020a) und Amnesty International (2020) betonten, dass selbst drastische Einschränkungen der Menschenrechte und die Ausrufung von Ausnahmezuständen legitime Reaktionen auf die Corona-Pandemie sein können. Nach dem Internationalen Pakt über wirtschaftliche, soziale und kulturelle Rechte, der „das Recht eines jeden auf das für ihn erreichbare Höchstmaß an körperlicher und geistiger Gesundheit“ beinhaltet, sind die Regierungen in der Tat dazu verpflichtet, epidemische, endemische, Berufsund sonstige Krankheiten zu verhindern, zu behandeln und zu bekämpfen (Vereinte Nationen 1966).
The United Nations use Security Council resolutions to attribute responsibility for issues of wor... more The United Nations use Security Council resolutions to attribute responsibility for issues of world politics either to itself or to other actors. In this article, we analyze the development of responsibility attribution over time. We evaluate whether the end of the Cold War and initiatives such as the Agenda for Peace and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) influenced the prevalence of responsibility attribution in Security Council resolutions. The analysis is based on a dataset covering all resolutions published between 1946 and 2015. Using methods of quantitative text and time series analysis we document an increase of responsibility attributions through resolutions over time. However, this increase is not clearly attributable to initiatives such as the Agenda and the R2P
Supplemental material, Replication_files for Non-violent resistance and the quality of democracy ... more Supplemental material, Replication_files for Non-violent resistance and the quality of democracy by Felix S Bethke and Jonathan Pinckney in Conflict Management and Peace Science
Supplemental material, CMP855918_Appendix for Non-violent resistance and the quality of democracy... more Supplemental material, CMP855918_Appendix for Non-violent resistance and the quality of democracy by Felix S Bethke and Jonathan Pinckney in Conflict Management and Peace Science
Zeitschrift für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung, 2020
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of countries worldwide have introduced severe li... more In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of countries worldwide have introduced severe limitations on the freedom of assembly, if not an outright lockdown, in many cases complemented by restrictions on further civil and political rights. Although restrictions were generally considered necessary to save lives and protect health care systems from overburdening, they also pose the risk of government overreach, that is, governments may use the pandemic as a convenient opportunity and justification to impose restrictions for political purposes. In this sense, COVID-19 may give yet another substantial boost to a global trend that has been unfolding since the early 2000s: the shrinking of civic spaces, which is characterized by an increase in government restrictions that target civil society actors and limit their freedoms of assembly, association, and expression. The aim of the paper is to assess civic space restrictions that have been imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic ...
Previous research has shown that successful non-violent resistance (NVR) campaigns promote democr... more Previous research has shown that successful non-violent resistance (NVR) campaigns promote democracy compared with violent revolutions and top-down liberalization. However, research to date has not examined the character and quality of the democratic regimes following NVR campaigns, or evaluated the mechanisms that produce this effect. In this paper, we address this gap by analyzing the effect of NVR on the quality of democracy, using the Polyarchy index from the Varieties of Democracies project and its sub-components: (1) elected executive; (2) free and fair elections; (3) freedom of expression; (4) associational autonomy; and (5) inclusive citizenship. Using kernel matching and differences-in-differences estimation we find that initiating a democratic transition through NVR improves democratic quality after transition significantly and substantially relative to cases without this characteristic. Our analysis of the Polyarchy index’s sub-components reveals that this positive effect...
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