Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar Statsvetenskapliga institutionen

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Expectations in the commons: On the dynamics of state-citizen cooperation contracts
(2025-09-23) Nilsson, Frida Angelica
This thesis addresses the question of how citizens' expectations on state delivery matter for their willingness to cooperate with the state in delivering collective benefits. The argument made in the thesis is that citizens' positive expectations of the state may affect cooperation in both positive and negative directions. While expectations may let the state rely on forward-looking strategies to enhance cooperation, they may at the same time give rise to new citizen demands on the state. In this sense, citizens' expectations work both supporting and constraining for the cooperation contract, in which citizens cooperate reciprocally with the state in exchange for collective benefits. It is suggested that the dynamics of the cooperation contract is continuously updated along with citizen expectations and experiences with the contract. This implies that the contract dynamics regularly change not only in contracts that are about to stabilize or undergo larger transformations, but also in contracts that are considered stable and in well-functioning equilibria. By combining a contract perspective with a micro-level approach, the thesis sheds new empirical light on classical questions of citizen compliance, the social contract, and state-citizen dynamics more generally.
“Gender Wars” in Europe: Diplomatic Practice under Polarized Conditions
(2025-03-28) De Silva, Monika; de Silva, Monika
Contemporary international relations, both globally and within Europe, are increasingly characterized by contestation. In this context, gender and sexuality are known to be mobilized by states to enhance their status, signal their alignment with alliances, and draw boundaries between “us” and “them”. Progressive states perceive the actions of conservative states as hostile and vice versa – framing them as challenges to human rights or as infringements on national sovereignty. In this dissertation, I complement this perspective by providing an in-depth analysis of diplomacy’s role in this context of “gender wars”. I argue that diplomats play a crucial role in mitigating many aspects of this phenomenon and in maintaining overall stability in inter-state relations. They achieve this through a range of routinized practices, including broad information-gathering, the construction of shared identities, consensus-building through ambiguity, and adherence to established rules. This conclusion is drawn from a multifaceted study of two diplomatic sites: bilateral diplomacy through embassies in Warsaw and multilateral diplomacy within the Council of the European Union in Brussels. The analysis is based on interviews with 40+ diplomats as well as official policy and legal documents, news articles, and social media posts. The findings are presented in a series of four papers, each with a distinct focus: Paper 1 examines the implementation of gender equality and LGBT+ strategies through bilateral diplomacy, Paper 2 explores how bilateral diplomats employ international law in their discourse, Paper 3 (co-authored with Mariia Tepliakova) traces the adoption process of the Istanbul Convention on violence against women within the Council, and Paper 4 analyzes negotiations over the use of the term “gender” in Council documents. This dissertation serves as a broader reflection on the management of difference in an era of polarization, populism, and deep contestation. While diplomatic practices are central to managing differences, they must be complemented by the efforts of other actors – particularly in areas that fall outside of habitual diplomatic practice – such as fostering genuine deliberation and addressing structural inequalities in inter-state relations. Furthermore, diplomacy’s ability to mediate differences may itself be undermined by its politicization.
Losing Your Grip: Feelings of Control and Unsubstantiated Political Beliefs
(2025-01-15) Sorak, Nicholas
Widespread corruption has equally widespread impact on the people and functioning of that society. However, while abuses of power may be found in all societies, in many places corruption is far less common and individuals are unlikely to experience it firsthand. In these less-corrupt settings there are nonetheless surprising portions of the populace that believe corruption and related abuses of power to be widespread. Even if unsubstantiated, these perceptions are troubling because they can nonetheless result in serious consequences for individual attitudes and behaviors that have ramifications for the society. Despite this, we still understand relatively little about the roots of these perceptions, particularly in settings where these perceptions are unlikely to be driven by the experience of corruption. This dissertation suggests that the issues of corruption and electoral misconduct present individuals with a plausible explanation for a host of individual and societal problems they might face, and heightened perceptions of corruption may thus offer those individuals a means to compensate for real or perceived limits to personal control. Theoretically, I draw from and expand upon research that has demonstrated threats to personal control to increase susceptibility to other unsubstantiated beliefs such as conspiracy theories as a compensatory response. I argue that several features found across these kinds of beliefs can make perceptions of corruption and election fraud an effective and potentially low-cost response to limited personal control, with these features also being found in populist rhetoric. However, the compensatory potential offered by these beliefs is conditional upon several societal factors, which are most consistently found in well-functioning democratic societies. I explore this issue in four papers, examining how personal control is related to perceptions of corruption and election fraud, as well as the appeal of populist rhetoric, in well-functioning democratic settings relative to the nature of this relationship in settings where corruption is more widespread. Across these studies, I find that increasing feelings of limited control are associated with increased perceptions of corruption, greater belief in election fraud, and increased support for parties using populist rhetoric. This association is strongest and most consistently found in the countries that are both least corrupt and perform best on democratic measures. The results highlight areas where further research is needed to better understand the drivers of these perceptions. They also suggest growing challenges that may be posed by ongoing sociopolitical developments.
The Causes and Consequences of Government Concessions to Protests
(2024-12-10) Leuschner, Elena
Political street protests are a prominent form of political participation worldwide that transcends political regimes and ideologies. When governments give in to protesters' demands and grant concessions, these concessions are often assumed to indicate a protest's success and end. This is, however, not always the case. I argue that we need to take into account that governments cannot be certain their concession will satisfy protesters, and protesters cannot be certain about their success. Reconsidering governments' incentives to grant concessions, I conceptualize concessions as merely ambiguous signals of success and ask what the causes of such concessions are. Further, since concessions might be ineffective at ending protests, I ask what the consequences of concessions are. To study these questions, I contribute four empirical papers. Investigating the causes of concessions, I conducted survey experiments with politicians in Belgium and Sweden. Paper 1 shows that politicians are most likely to concede to peaceful protests unless they expect their voters to be present, which makes them more tolerant of protesters' disruptive tactics. When protests are large, they are likely to talk within their party about the protest but also police it. In paper 2, I find that shared policy preferences between politicians and protesters increase politicians' willingness to concede to protesters. Priors toward the legitimacy of protests, however, influence this willingness. Regarding the consequences of concessions, in paper 3, Sebastian Hellmeier and I find that protests in authoritarian states are likely to continue after government concessions. We discuss these findings in the light of credible commitment problems between the state and protesters. In paper 4, Simon Gren and I show that concessions in the form of responsive withdrawals of unpopular policies are not electorally rewarded by Swedish voters. This points towards a challenge for incumbents when choosing whether to concede.
Beyond the Border: International pressures and state-building
(2024-12-10) Åsblad, Magnus
States vary tremendously in their ability to effectively implement decisions. Moreover, such differences in “state capacity” exist not only between countries, but also within the territories that states claim to govern. For this reason, social scientists have sought to understand the causes of state-building. While many scholars agree that external threats in previous centuries were an important factor in explaining why Western Europe came to be dominated by strong territorial states, there is significant disagreement concerning whether and how international threats lead to state-building in the world created after World War II. Given the often contradictory findings of previous research – where external threats are sometimes positively associated with state-building, while the opposite appears true in other cases – this dissertation, through three individual articles, seeks to understand under which conditions international threats lead to investments in state capacity. Utilizing both subnational and country-level data, and employing a variety of regression techniques, I demonstrate (1) that states still allocate significant resources to their border regions, especially those bordering hostile or rival states; (2) that in dictatorships, the association between threats from neighboring states and state capacity is moderated by the degree of power-sharing; and (3) that areas inhabited by transnational ethnic groups – i.e., those with ethnic kin in adjacent countries – display higher levels of “hard” state presence, such as military or police forces, while this is not the case for regions inhabited by domestic minorities. In summary, this dissertation demonstrates that international threats of various kinds remain important for explaining the development of state capacity (or the lack thereof), even in contemporary times. However, it also shows that the effect of different types of cross-border threats on state-building is heterogeneous: They affect state capacity in different parts of a country’s territory in varying ways and interact with domestic political institutions. In some cases, external threats are associated with successful state-building, while in others, their effect is negligible.
Chasing Gold, Overlooking Welfare: Exposure to Wealth in Everyday Life and Support for Social Spending.
(2024-10-25) Lungu, Laura-Silvia; Lungu, Laura
According to conventional wisdom, exposure to wealth in everyday life decreases subjective economic status, resulting in higher support for redistribution and social spending among less-affluent citizens. However, sociological and behavioral economics research suggests an additional psychological effect that has been overlooked in the inequality literature: the desire of less-affluent individuals to emulate the consumption of the wealthy. This doctoral dissertation contributes to the debate on the redistributive effects of subjective inequality perceptions by examining the relationship between exposure to wealth and attitudes toward social spending from this novel theoretical perspective. The central argument is that exposure to wealth biases preferences for social spending toward the present. Everyday exposure to displays of wealth decreases individuals' subjective economic status. As a result, less affluent citizens emulate the consumption of wealthier individuals to mitigate the psychological and economic costs of perceived relative deprivation. This, I argue, results in preferences for policies with immediate rewards, like lower taxes, over policies with long-delayed benefits, such as social welfare programs traditionally associated with redistribution. The dissertation comprises of three research papers combining both observational and experimental data from various advanced democracies. I find that exposure to conspicuous consumption in the local environment correlates with reduced support for social spending and higher opposition to taxes among citizens with incomes below the national median. Furthermore, I show that subjective perceptions of low economic status are associated with lower support for tax increases aimed at funding social spending, at the same time as they are positively correlated with demand for reducing inequality. Finally, while the experimental results are inconclusive, I do find evidence that exposure to displays of wealth does not only evoke feelings of social distance from the rich, as conventionally assumed, but also feelings of admiration, envy, and an explicit desire for economic status improvement and for emulating the living standards of wealthier individuals. In conclusion, this dissertation nuances the debate on the redistributive effects of subjective inequality perceptions, as it shows that exposure to displays of wealth in the local environment and subjective perceptions of low economic status are associated with demand for policies with immediate economic rewards at the expense of social welfare programs. By increasing preferences for gold over welfare, exposure to wealth may reinforce, rather than reduce, inequality.
Clients of God - Exploring how hierarchical religious bonds shape political behaviour
(2024-08-19) Aiysha, Varraich
One of the perennial questions of political science is how people decide which candidate to vote for. In the context of developing democracies one dominant explanation is clientelism, where clients sell their votes in exchange for a material good to the highest bidder. In short, citizens are understood to be motivated by material benefits when casting their votes. What remains largely absent from the contemporary political science scholarship is a theory of clientelism that can explain why client-voters may be swayed by non-material goods when they cast their vote – that is an understanding that goes beyond the economic lens of the material exchange, but an exchange that is simultaneously economic, political, ritual, and moral. This dissertation expands our understanding of clientelism to include the exchange of non-material goods, via religion. It does so by exploring how religion shapes clientelism. The project is set up in two parts. The first part develops an inductive theory of religious clientelism. Here the exchange takes place between voters and politicians both of whom play dual roles: patrons are both living saint and politician, and clients are both followers of and voters for these patrons. The exchange is centred on non-material incentives. Unlike the marketised model of clientelism, religious clientelism allows the inclusion of context and social identities of citizens as part of their calculus when casting their vote. The theory is undergirded by data collected through semi-structured interviews with voters in the Pakistani provinces of Punjab and Sindh. I argue that voters who share religious hierarchical bonds with candidates prefer non-material religious rewards in the clientelistic exchange with their patrons. This is rooted in the dual role that religion plays for clients – both as a social identity and individual belief system. The theory argues that when hierarchical clientelistic bonds are rooted in religion clients are driven by the believer’s rationality, which finds utility in non-material religious goods. It is this role of religion that enables non-material goods to be part of their calculus in the political sphere. The findings highlight the hierarchical religious bond as the driver of voters’ political behaviour in terms of voting and partisanship, where clients vote for the patron-saint and follow them across partisan lines if the patron were to change political party. The second part of the project substantiates the theory with an in-depth case study of Sufi saint-politicians and their disciple-voters in Pakistan. I provide a bottom-up analysis of voter preferences, with the original contribution of non-material religious goods to the clientelism scholarship. I also provide a top-down analysis of the political behaviour of patron-saints. I illustrate how the religious position of patrons provides them advantages in the political sphere relative to non-saint politicians, and how this reinforces their positions as powerholders. These advantages include their access to a steady votebank, organisational infrastructure, and access to non-material goods. I tease out the mechanisms that undergird the political behaviour of both actors, illustrating the multifaceted role of religion as both social identity and belief system. Combining insights from an original database of Sufi saint-politicians in the National and Provincial Assemblies and fieldwork (including semi-structured and elite interviews, and participant observation), this study is the first to gather original empirical data on this subset of voters.
Bugs and Bureaucracies: Institutions, Administrative Autonomy, and the Governance of Antibiotic Resistance
(2024-05-20) Carelli, Daniel Eric
This dissertation investigates how variations in civil service arrangements among European states impact concerted governance over antibiotic resistance. Through four standalone research papers, it demonstrates that different institutional setups and degrees of administrative autonomy result in different governance outcomes. Consequently, concerted governance is deeply rooted in the institutionalized structures of domestic politico-administrative arrangements. However, the findings also suggest that even modest administrative reforms have the potential to disrupt the prevailing order. Crucially, the dissertation reveals that granting extensive latitude for action to senior civil servants and experts, driven by epistemic and collaborative values, creates favorable conditions for cross-sectoral and sustained governance. This holds true at both domestic and international levels. The dissertation contributes to the longstanding debate on administrative autonomy and political control, offering new insights into how these crucial factors should be configured for effective governance of collective action issues.
On People and Their Passions: The Role of Identities and Emotions in Radical Political Behavior
(2024-04-25) Versteegen, Peter Luca
Abundant evidence suggests that identities and emotions motivate individuals to engage in two recently prominent political behaviors: radical right support and affective polarization. This dissertation integrates this knowledge by asking why identities and emotions are so relevant. I propose that either factor shapes how individuals perceive their position in relation to others, motivating to exclude or oppose them. Across five papers, I leverage seven theories substantiating and a mixed-methods approach examining this claim. In so doing, this dissertation establishes one mechanism––perceived societal position––for why identities and emotions matter for radical right support and affective polarization. Moreover, by integrating these two behaviors into radical political behavior, I invite future research to theorize and investigate these behaviors’ shared consequences for social cohesion and democratic norms. This dissertation implies that purely rational approaches to understanding and addressing radical political behavior are limited. Identity or emotion-based interventions may be more effective.
Pregnancy and politics: On the gender gap in political knowledge, attitudes, and participation
(2024-03-21) Markstedt, Elias
Pregnancy and early parenthood are significant life milestones. They also affect women and men differently. The biological marvel of pregnancy and birth and the changing social roles that come with parenthood can trigger a reevaluation of personal and social values and political priorities among mothers and fathers and lead to new reflections. I ask how the time around pregnancy influences political knowledge, attitudes, and participation and whether the experiences of mothers and fathers can explain political differences between women and men. There is a lot of research on the political consequences of parenthood, but pregnancy is less well-understood. Furthermore, causal inference is uncommon in this area of research. I make two main contributions. I integrate pregnancy into the study of how parenthood affects politics, and I provide more robust inferences based on original longitudinal data in a research area that largely relies on data with single time points. There are four research papers in the dissertation. Three of the papers study the Swedish case. They reveal that overall, pregnancy and early parenthood have a surprisingly limited impact on a broad range of political outcomes at the individual level. Political demobilization is more likely than mobilization, but these changes usually dissipate one to two years post-partum. However, a closer examination of specific topics reveals that parents undergo a learning process and shift their attitudes concerning welfare-state policy and issues that are directly relevant for parents. Mothers and fathers are often similarly affected. Pregnancy and early parenthood cannot, therefore, explain the persistent gender gaps in political knowledge, attitudes, and participation. In the fourth paper, I extend the scope of the analysis beyond parenthood and study the effects of women politicians' media visibility—an alternative explanation for gender gaps in political knowledge. I find that an increased visibility of women does not significantly close the gender knowledge gap in the 49 countries under study. It suggests that if there is a role-model effect of women politicians on political knowledge, it is not a direct function of how often women are seen in the media. In conclusion, although the effects of pregnancy and early parenthood appear to be limited, their significance should not be underestimated in relation to other events in people’s lives, especially since prevailing expectations are rooted in decades of cross-sectional research that likely overestimates the effects of many different types of events. My findings underscore the critical importance of longitudinal research for furthering our understanding of the many ways in which life experiences such as pregnancy and parenthood influence democratic citizenship.
Beyond the Party’s Realm - The Consequences of Variation in Candidate Selection
(2023-11-10) Schwenk, Jana
In the last two decades, Western European parties have introduced various methods to select candidates for executive public office. A process that before was mainly the privilege of a narrow elite was opened to party members in several parties. While research extensively investigated the effects of variation in candidate selection on parties, little is known about the effects that variation in candidate selection has on voters and whether the effects are gendered. The dissertation argues that candidate selection has consequences beyond the party and explores in four research articles how variation in candidate selection affects voters’ corruption perceptions, their evaluations of candidate quality, female representation, and gendered effects of evaluations of corruptibility. Overall, the results suggest that the consequences of variation in candidate selection are far-reaching, highlighting the importance of considering the impact of candidate selection and intraparty democracy more generally on outcomes beyond the party. The research articles in the dissertation demonstrate that candidate selection can affect corruption perceptions, evaluations of valence, and female representation. Not only does this dissertation demonstrate the need to consider the effects of intraparty dynamics on factors outside of the party, but it also illustrates how previous literature on each of the outcomes investigated in the dissertation fell short of considering intraparty democracy as an explanatory factor. Given the results of this dissertation, future research should thus focus more strongly theoretically and empirically on the effects of intraparty dynamics.
Aid by Democratic Versus Autocratic Donors: Democratization Processes and Citizens’ Perceptions in Recipient Countries
(2023-08-21) Gafuri, Adea
OECD countries are no longer the sole major providers of financial flows abroad. Authoritarian countries such as China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, with their distinct practices and implementation processes, are increasingly present in low- and middle-income countries. In this Ph.D. dissertation, I develop and test hypotheses on the influence of foreign aid on democratization processes and citizens’ attitudes in recipient countries. Employing a multi-method approach, using observational and experimental methods, I analyze the role of democratic donors such as the European Union (EU) and autocratic donors like China, both together and separately. I find that democratic donors like the EU, who target democratic institutions via democracy assistance can foster democratization. I argue that democracy assistance is effective when aid is coupled with political conditionality and monitoring mechanisms. On the other hand, aid from autocratic donors like China can decrease support for democracy, especially among those who view autocratic donors very positively. Autocratic aid impacts these perceptions through (1) attribution processes, i.e., individuals learn about aid projects that are implemented close to where they live (2) the instrumentalization of aid by political elites, i.e., political elites influence citizens by spreading information about the benevolence and generosity of authoritarian donors. Finally, this Ph.D. dissertation demonstrates that foreign donors’ attributes convey to citizens how likely corruption is in the project and how responsive their local government and donors will be in implementing such projects. The political regime of the donor, whether democratic or autocratic, signals the level of responsiveness to citizens’ demands. On the other hand, whether a donor is transparent or not, indicates the risk of corruption in the project and in the local government.
Political Trust – More Personal Than We Thought? Explaining How and When Personality Traits Affect Political Trust.
(2023-08-16) Robertson, Felicia
Political trust is crucial for a well-functioning society. Yet few countries enjoy the benefits of high political trust. This makes people wonder how trust in institutions is built. While trust in political institutions is considered to be an individual's evaluation of institutional performance, individuals within the same country make very different assessments. In this dissertation, I show that personality traits, that are genetic and socialized at an early age, can help explain why individuals' trust assessments differ. As personality traits reflect individuals' behavioral, cognitive, and emotional patterns, I argue that traits affect political trust in three ways, directly through our general tendencies, indirectly through how we process information and experiences, or how we interact with institutions. In three research papers, I study the relationship between personality traits and political trust in different political contexts, using different measurements of personality traits, political institutions, and institutional experiences. The results show that personality traits contribute to explaining why individuals' levels of trust in the same institutions differ. I conclude that personality traits are an important explanation for how political trust is formed and need to be considered when studying how trust changes over time.
Public Attitudes Towards Environmental Taxation: The Interplay Between Values, Trust, and Quality of Government
(2023-06-16) Davidovic, Dragana
Environmental problems are commonly understood to be rooted in collective action dilemmas where the rational course of action for individuals is to engage in polluting activities to receive short-term benefits, while the long-term costs of those activities are borne by the collective. Voluntary cooperation to solve large-scale collective action problems such as climate change is unlikely. Thus, state intervention is needed to enforce cooperation through implementation of various climate policy instruments. These tools are more likely to be successfully and effectively implemented if they are supported by citizens. Policy experts argue that environmental taxation is the most effective way to mitigate climate change; however, public support is lacking. This dissertation investigates whether the institutional context, specifically perceptions of low quality of government (QoG), moderates the link between individuals’ pro-environmental and political-ideological value orientations and climate policy attitudes. Analyzing cross-sectional and original survey experimental data, the dissertation examines if quality of government shapes the climate policy attitudes of citizens, and through what mechanisms. The analyses show that perceptions of poor institutional quality lower trust in political actors and institutions, and generate negative climate policy attitudes even among those who otherwise hold pro-environmental values and concerns and favorable attitudes towards government regulation. The dissertation contributes to an improved understanding of the determinants of climate policy attitudes and more informed recommendations for policymakers, and will hopefully also inspire further research on how institutional factors affect the prospects for effective climate policy.
Contested Feminism: Backlash and the Radical Right
(2023-06-02) Off, Gefjon
During the past decade, various societies have observed feminist mobilizations and antifeminist counter-mobilizations, the latter being partly driven by radical right parties. Even in societies marked by institutions and norms that should be most conducive to progressive gender equality and LGBTQI+ norms, feminism is a point of contestation. Through a compilation of five papers using multiple methods, this dissertation investigates the contested nature of contemporary feminism across different European contexts. Specifically, the papers examine a) conservative/liberal polarization over feminism; b) the effect of (anti)feminist attitudes and feminist issue salience on radical right voting; c) radical right voters’ (anti)feminist attitudes; d) young men's perceptions of feminism as a threat; and e) radical right voters’ cultural grievances over feminism. Theoretically, I apply research on issue salience and threat perceptions to the study of attitudes toward feminism. Methodologically, I analyze existing and originally collected, experimental and observational data from surveys and interviews. In doing so, I theoretically and empirically contribute to research on cultural backlash, radical right voting, mass ideological polarization, antifeminism, and sexism. I find that people who oppose or counter-react against certain progressive gender and sexuality issues tend to vote for the radical right and distrust institutions. Demographically, they tend to be young men living in regions with increasing unemployment. They particularly oppose gender and sexuality issues that are salient in the public debate and evoke threat perceptions. Based on the findings, I develop a framework that may serve as guidance for future research on socially conservative backlash, as well as liberal-conservative polarization.
Playing the Enemy: Information, Deception, and Dictatorial Survival
Dwinger, Felix
What strategies do autocrats use to maintain power? Across three papers, I examine puzzling aspects of autocratic rule. These range from personalist dictators publicizing failed conspiracies to opposition involvement in and service provision informed through query sessions under competitive authoritarianism. Personalist dictators in hostile environments can cultivate a robust reputation for invincibility through public accusations. If successful, it fully deters any potential future rivals. Competitive authoritarian regimes may grant opposition elites regular opportunities to publicly criticize the government during question times. It can discourage public dissent in situations where collective action against the regime would have succeeded, had no opposition deputies given public statements. Such biased question times are one option for autocrats to stabilize their rule through query sessions. Another is informational question times: partisan deputies with low affinities towards democracy are inclined to inform about grievances among society so autocrats can improve service provision. Overall, this dissertation clarifies how and when autocrats can gather and manipulate information to maintain power, and what roles repression plays in this regard.
Towards Legitimacy as Congruence: Regimes' Menus of Legitimation and Citizens’ Appetites
(2022-05-23) Tannenberg, Marcus
Legitimacy is one of the most crucial concepts in political science. It concerns how authority can be exercised in ways that those subjected to it willingly accept, something that all rulers desire. It is also one of the most contested concepts in the field, largely due to the difficulty of measurement. In this dissertation, I lay the foundations for a novel understanding of legitimacy, as the congruence between rulers' legitimation claims – their menus of legitimation – and the values and preferences – the appetites – of their citizens. In four separate research papers, I show the importance and utility of this approach. I provide empirical evidence that existing measures of legitimacy and its neighboring concepts, such as trust and popular support, suffer from a substantial autocratic bias. Self- censorship in autocratic countries results in inflated regime-friendly evaluations com- pared to in democracies. I conceptualize and develop measures of the most typical legitimation claims that rulers provide as justifications for why they are entitled to rule. I then match this expert coded data with global public opinion data to create measures of congruence between menus and appetites across five dimensions. Legitimacy as congruence provides a relational and multidimensional understanding of legitimacy, aligning the concept and its measurement. I show the value of this new measure in predicting outcomes for which the literature has strong theoretical expectations. I conclude that existing approaches to measuring legitimacy are flawed for the comparison across regime types, and that conceptualizing and operationalizing legitimacy as congruence provide an avenue to move the field forward.
Party Organizations and the Dynamics of Autocratic Rule: Co-optation, Repression, and Regime Change
(2022-05-12) Kavasoglu, Berker
This dissertation is about political parties in autocracies. The recent institutionalist turn in comparative authoritarianism has renewed attention to the role of political parties by highlighting the strategic value of these institutions for autocratic leaders. Scholars suggest that political parties in autocracies enable autocrats to credibly commit to sharing power with or channeling state benefits to political elites and the masses, thereby helping autocrats to mitigate potential elite and mass dissent. Yet, research largely overlooks the issue that not all political parties have organizational features that can help autocrats achieve these objectives. Despite important advancements in the literature, scholars of autocracy have so far paid insufficient attention to the variation in explicit organizational features of political parties. By introducing the most comprehensive data set on party organizations covering more than 600 parties from 134 autocracies between 1970 and 2019, this dissertation addresses this gap. In individual articles, I theorize that the variation in party organizational features shapes autocrats’ incentives and abilities to co-opt support, violently repress opponents, and institute democratizing reforms to maintain themselves in power. Taken together, individual articles demonstrate the importance of focusing on the organizational features of parties to fully understand how parties shape substantial political outcomes in autocracies.
Principled Principals? Voter Responses to Public Goods Provision
(2022-03-02) Hartmann, Felix
Do voters in developing democracies reward incumbents for public goods provision? One of the basic assumptions of democratic theory is that voters use elections to punish and reward incumbents for their performance in office. However, many accounts characterize elections in developing democracies as being dominated by clientelism and vote buying, suggesting that voters do not base their vote on public service provision. This dissertation proposes a somewhat more optimistic picture. The results highlight that voters in developing democracies are willing to reward their representatives for effective public goods provision. However, the findings also suggest that societies can be trapped in an electoral equilibrium with low public goods provision because voters have pessimistic expectations about the effectiveness of public goods policies and are not able to attribute public goods outcomes to the efforts of their representatives. While pessimistic expectations lead voters to not reward incumbents for investment in public goods policies when outcomes are uncertain, failure of attribution leads to low electoral returns even for effective public goods provision. Policy instruments that assign responsibilities to politicians during policy implementation can increase attributability by enabling incumbents to credibly claim credit for public service provision or by making politicians’ efforts observable to voters.
Perceptions of Political Competition and the Integrity of Elections
(2022-01-26) Dawson, Stephen
Political competition is generally regarded as one of the hallmarks of a well-functioning democracy. Competitive elections hold politicians to account, thereby increasing government performance to the benefit of citizens. However, the uncertainty generated by close elections can also create perverse incentives for political actors to undermine the integrity of the contest to improve their chances of victory. Yet we still know relatively little about when and in what ways close elections can be detrimental to democracy. This dissertation suggests that the relationship between electoral integrity and political competition is best understood from the perspective that there are two primary dimensions of this competition: the intensity of electoral competitiveness and the credibility of the information that portrays it. While political elites may be incentivised to manipulate elections in different ways to improve or consolidate their chances of victory, voters may also consider portrayals of competition along these two dimensions when deciding whether and for whom to vote. Four research articles study different aspects of this relationship across a range of institutional contexts and using several methodological approaches. First, a cross-national study of presidential elections across two levels of democracy finds that electoral fraud increases with electoral competition in democratic contexts. Second, a study on the 2016 municipal elections in South Africa reveals a strategic political economy of targeted vote-buying. Third, a qualitative comparison of falling participation levels in Central Asia and the Caucasus reconsiders the cyclical nature of the relationship between political competition and electoral integrity. Fourth, a survey experiment in Turkey attempts to gauge whether the perceived credibility of opinion polls can have adverse consequences for voting behaviour. The findings of this dissertation suggest that political competition – and importantly how it is perceived – can have significant consequences for the conduct of elections. It is therefore of great importance to pay close attention to how information relating to competition is interacted with by political actors during elections.

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