Scope Conditions Podcast - Alan Jacobs and Yang-Yang Zhou

Latest Episodes:

Why Empires Declared a War on Drugs, with Diana Kim Nov 11, 2021

Show notes

Today on Scope Conditions: how the paper-pushers of Empires reshaped colonialism in Southeast Asia.

Our guest is Dr. Diana Kim, an Assistant Professor at Georgetown’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Hans Kohn member (2021-22) at the Institute for Advanced Studies’ School of Historical Studies. In her award-winning book, Empires of Vice, Diana unpacks the puzzle of opium prohibition in the French and British colonies of Southeast Asia. As she traces out the twists and turns of colonial drug policies, Diana asks how states define the problems they need to solve, and how policymakers come to see crisis in the things they once took for granted.

For decades, opium was a cornerstone of European colonialism in places like Burma, Malaya, and French Indochina. At their peak, opium taxes made up more than halfof all colonial revenues. At the same time, levying a surcharge on what they deemed a peculiarly Asian vice gave the colonizers a sense of moral superiority over their subjects. But over the late 19th and early 20th centuries, colonial governments across Southeast Asia made a sharp reversal toward opium prohibition.

Why did the French and British choose to crack down on what they had once seen as a fiscal bedrock of empire? How did empires that had grown up so tightly entangled with the opium trade come to see the drug as so deeply troubling? As Diana contends, this dramatic about-face was driven less by dictates from London and Paris and more by the evolving understandings of low-level bureaucrats on the ground in the colonies. Through the day-to-day work of administering policies and keeping records, these minor functionaries developed pet theories, drew casual causal inferences, and constructed new official realities that filtered up to the highest reaches of government – shaping perceptions, issue frames, and policy debates in the metropoles.

We talk with Diana about how imperial drug policies across the region were recast from the bottom-up as rank-and-file bureaucrats puzzled, and often bungled, their way through the everyday challenges of running an empire. We also discuss how Diana pieced together these stories: how she turned troves of archival paperwork, strewn across three continents, into coherent narratives. She tells us how she reconstructed colonial administrators’ interpretive struggles and how she connected the dots from ideas developed on the ground to political debates and decisions back in Europe.

We also talk with Diana about the unusual portrait she paints of colonial governance: one in which the colonizers assume power before they’ve really figured out what to do with it. Rather than a confident empire imposing its will on its subjects, we see decision-making processes shot through with misperception, unintended consequences, and inner anxieties. We get Diana to reflect on how her account squares with common understandings of imperialism and of the state itself.
For references to all the academic works discussed in this episode, visit the episode webpage at https://www.scopeconditionspodcast.com/episodes/episode-22-why-empires-declared-a-war-on-drugs-with-diana-kim

Can Boosting State Capacity Curb Social Disorder? with Anna Wilke Oct 12, 2021

Show notes

Today we are talking about the problem of maintaining social order. In particular, what happens when citizens see the police as ineffective and, in turn, decide to take the law into their own hands? And once mob justice becomes commonplace in a society, what can be done?

In places where the state is weak, citizens often have to take it upon themselves to provide basic public services, such as building schools or collecting the garbage. And, as our guest today tells us, it can also include policing. In parts of the world where the police are seen as corrupt or inept, ordinary citizens often turn to what’s known as mob vigilantism. Groups will form spontaneously to apprehend and inflict violence – sometimes extreme violence – upon those they suspect of committing crimes. In some places, mob justice is exceedingly common: in South Africa, for instance, the police registered two mob vigilante murders per day in 2018 (and that is likely an undercount).

Mob vigilantism represents a deep breakdown in citizen trust in the state’s ability to maintain social order. Is there anything that governments or civil society can do to boost confidence in the state and, in turn, head off mob violence? Our guest, Dr. Anna Wilke, has recently completed a novel field experiment to address this question in the context of South Africa. Currently a postdoctoral fellow with Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) at the University of California, Berkeley, Anna will be joining the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis as an Assistant Professor next fall.

For the experiment, Anna partnered with a local non-profit to test the effects of a simple intervention: the installation of a home-based alarm system. When a resident or intruder triggers the alarm, it directly texts the local police precinct with the geolocation of the household – in principle, allowing the police to find and respond to criminal incidents more quickly. The question Anna asks is: Does enhancing the responsiveness of local law enforcement lead citizens to see the police as more effective and to resort lessto mob violence?

In addition to hearing about her findings, we have a great conversation with Anna about the practical and inferential challenges she encountered in implementing and analyzing her experiment. For instance, it turns out that some of the things that make it hard for the state to effectively manage social problems – like the lack of street addresses in informally settled neighborhoods – also make it hard to sample and survey in these places.
Anna also had to deal with all the messiness of running an experiment in the real world, rather than in a controlled setting. This includes the possibility that she was not just treating the people she gave the alarm to, but also their neighbors, who might have also perceived themselves as having quicker access to the police.
Finally, we bring Anna’s research into the larger conversation around policing and racial bias, and ask: what does it mean to increase police presence and public reliance on the police when there is also systemic police abuse?
For references to all the academic works discussed in this episode, visit the episode webpage at https://www.scopeconditionspodcast.com/episodes/episode2-1.

The Autocrat's Gambit, with Anne Meng May 29, 2021

Show notes

By their very nature, autocracies are political systems in which power is highly concentrated; dictators can do pretty much as they please. So dictatorships might seem an unusual place to go looking for institutions: the rules and structures that limit discretion and set bounds on who can do what.
Yet over the last two decades, political scientists studying autocracies have done exactly that. The field has witnessed what Tom Pepinsky has called “an institutional turn” in the study of authoritarianism, with scholars such as Barbara Geddes, Jason Brownlee, and Jennifer Gandhi analyzing how institutions like dominant parties and elected legislatures order political life in autocracies and help ensure the survival of these regimes.
<a href='http://www.annemeng.com/'><em>Dr. Anne Meng</em></a>, an assistant professor of politics at the University of Virginia, began her own research on autocratic institutions with a focus on ruling parties. She eventually came to believe, however, that parties and legislatures were mostly a sideshow, and that she and other scholars of autocratic institutions had been getting something fundamentally wrong. They were too focused on de jure rules that appear constraining and insufficiently focused on de facto power: on whether institutions have any impact on the distribution of actual leverage within the political system.
Anne’s recent book, Constraining Dictatorship, is an analysis of how and why autocrats use institutions to share real power with their rivals, and of how these institutions shape the regime’s long-run trajectory. Anne also argues that the institutions that matter most are devices that we usually overlook, such as succession rules and cabinet appointments.
In our conversation with Anne, we probe the logic of her innovative argument and hear about how she confronted the difficulties of testing it empirically, like how to measure the elusive concept of leader strength. We also talk about the formal model she developed and how it helped her clarify the tradeoffs that leaders confront as they choose between short-term material gains and long-run survival in office.
More broadly, this is a conversation about what it is, fundamentally, that allows institutions to lend order to political life, and about how we can identify meaningful institutional and political change when we see it. You will also want to stay tuned to hear how Anne wrote the bulk of this book in a single semester.
You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.

Manipulating Personnel for Power, with Mai Hassan May 02, 2021

Show notes

Our guest today is Dr. Mai Hassan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Mai is the author of a recent book, Regime Threats and State Solutions, about how leaders manipulate the bureaucracy to maintain their hold on power.
Imagine a political system in which the president has the power to hire, fire, and shuffle bureaucrats in the most important state agencies. How would the leader strategically choose to wield this authority? Perhaps she would decide topack the state with her own supporters -- for example, with members of her ethnic group -- to ensure loyalty and to maximize the chances that presidential edicts will be faithfully carried out.
However, holding power often means striking bargains with rival elites. Usually the best way to do that is to give those rival elitesa foothold in the state and to hand out jobs to their supporters. A leader who packs the state has fewer spoils to share.
Mai’s book delves into this core dilemma of power-maintenance: how can leaders keep their friends close and their enemies closer? When do executives opt to share power, and when do they choose to hoard it by staffing the state with loyalists?
In today’s episode, we talk with Mai about her theory of bureaucratic control. It’s an argument in which leaders don’t merely choose bureaucrats based on their loyalties; they also manipulate civil servants’ loyalties and attachments, by strategically placing them and shuffling them across regions of the country.
We also talk about how Mai tests her argument by using a vast original dataset on decades of Kenyan administrative appointments, spanning both the country’s autocratic and democratic periods. And Mai tells us how she stumbled onto the puzzle of bureaucratic manipulation while digging through archival data for an altogether different project.
You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.

Voter Suppression Goes Global, with Elizabeth Iams Wellman Apr 04, 2021

Show notes

This is a conversation about the politics of voting from abroad: in particular, about how governments manipulate emigrants’ access to the ballot in order to protect their own hold on power.
For the most part, elections are events that happen inside a country, as resident citizens cast ballots at local polling stations. However, around the world, about 281 million people live outside the country in which they were born, and a majority of countries give their emigrant citizens the legal right to vote.
The numbers here are not trivial. While exact figures are hard to come by, there are 80 countries around the world that both recognize voting rights for citizens abroad and have emigrant populations that add up to 5% or more of the national population. For countries with competitive elections, emigrant citizens represent a potentially critical voting bloc living outsidethe country.
Potentially is the key word here, though. For many of these citizens, the right to vote is only hypothetical because their governments often do little to make it practically feasible for them to cast a ballot. While a country like Senegal sets up 750 polling stations around the world, Kenya sets up only 5.
Our guest today, Dr. Elizabeth Iams Wellman, contends that that is no accident. She argues that incumbents strategically suppress -- or expand -- the vote from abroad to suit their electoral needs. A Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Williams College, Beth has recently published two articles on the topic, in the American Political Science Reviewand African Affairs, and is at work on a book project titled The Diaspora Vote Dilemma.
We talk with Beth about the often-hidden politics of emigrant enfranchisement. She tells us about the places where the vote from abroad has decided elections, such as Italy, Moldova, Romania, and Cape Verde. But we also discuss the tools that governments use to make sure that emigrant voters can’t sway elections -- tools such as limiting polling locations and enforcing strict voter ID laws.
Beth also tells us about her research process, including how she addressed a set of interesting measurement challenges -- such as, how to capture the electoral threat posed by the vote from abroad -- so that she could test her argument statistically for a large set of elections in sub-Saharan Africa. But she also highlights how her qualitative analysis of individual cases revealed competitive dynamics and strategic mechanisms that she could never have extracted from a regression model. And at a time in which most comparativists have found themselves unable to travel for fieldwork, we were intrigued by the remote interviewing that Beth did alongside months of on-the-ground research, and we ask her about her experience with conducting research interviews via video call.
You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.

Surviving the Syrian Civil War, with Justin Schon Mar 15, 2021

Show notes

In this episode of Scope Conditions, we talk about how civilians seek to survive civil war. Our guest is Dr. Justin Schon, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Virginia’s Democratic Statecraft Lab. In his new book, Surviving the War in Syria, Justin examines the repertoires of strategies that civilians choose from as they seek to keep themselves, their families, and their communities safe.
In the West, we often think of migration as the key survival strategy for those threatened by civil violence, probably because migration as the strategy we in the West most readily observe. However, Justin argues that migration, while a common response, is only one of the multiple ways in which civilians seek to survive civil war. Moreover, it is a response that requires money, social connections, and other resources that not all civilians have. Justin highlights an alternative survival strategy, which he calls “community support”: stayingin the conflict zone to help friends, family, and neighbors survive.
In this episode, we talk with Justin about how civilians choose among survival strategies. We discuss the nature of the risks that civilians face during civil war; how they seek to manage those risks; and the experiences that shape their choices. More broadly, this is a conversation about how our perspective on conflict and migration shifts as we come to think of civilians in civil war as agents -- making difficult, high-stakes decisions under constraints -- rather than as passive victimsof circumstance. We also talk with Justin about his fieldwork, asking him about the practical, inferential, and ethical complexities of the 10 months of interviews that he conducted with refugees in Turkey, Jordan, Kenya, and the U.S.
You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.

Redistribution as Fairness, with Charlotte Cavaillé Feb 22, 2021

Show notes

We are talking today about the politics of redistribution in an age of rising inequality.
Our guest is Dr. Charlotte Cavaillé, an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan’s Ford School. We discuss with Charlotte her book project, Fair Enough: Support for Redistribution in the Age of Inequality, which seeks to explain how citizens reason about taxing the rich and spending on social benefits for the middle-class and poor.
The book’s starting point is a thorny puzzle of political economy: why do governments in advanced democracies do so little to counteract rising inequality? In countries like the United States and Britain -- where income and wealth have become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the very rich while living standards have stagnated for most households -- why don’t we see governments playing Robin Hood, taking more from those at the top and distributing more generous social benefits to the rest of the population?
A large literature has established that part of the answer lies in political inequality: in the ways the rich convert their economic resources into political influence. The middle class and poor may want redistribution but they cannot get it, because they lack political influence.
What Charlotte does is to take a step back to ask: how popular is Robin Hood anyway? A substantial part of the reason why we don’t see more redistribution, Charlotte argues, is because most citizens in places like the U.S. and the U.K. are not demanding it -- that is, even they would benefit from it. Charlotte wants to know why.
Drawing on insights from behavioral economics, she argues that, if we want to understand the mass politics of redistribution, we have to stop thinking about people as purely self-interested income-maximizers. We need to start thinking of people as social beings who place a fundamental value on principles of fairness. When citizens think about redistribution, they start by asking themselves fairness-oriented questions about whether everyone is getting what they deserve, who is contributing to the common good, and who is free-riding, taking advantage of the generosity of others.
In this conversation, Charlotte traces out the logic of redistribution as fairness and talks to us about how this logic can explain weak support for redistribution, even as inequality skyrockets. We also talk with Charlotte about other puzzling empirical patterns, such as why the affluent often support more generous social spending than the poor. And we discuss the prospects for progressive reform, including why the COVID pandemic might -- and, just as well, might not -- generate the political conditions for expansionary social policy in advanced democracies.
You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.

Strategic Indifference as Refugee Policy in the Global South, with Kelsey Norman Feb 08, 2021

Show notes

In this episode, we ask: when a state doesn’t enforce the rules, is it because they don’t have the capacity to do so, or because they’ve chosen not to? Put differently, when is indifferencea deliberate policy strategy?
We talk with Dr. Kelsey Norman about her new book, Reluctant Reception: Refugees, Migration, and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa.Kelsey is a Fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, where she directs the Women’s Rights, Human Rights & Refugees program.
In Reluctant Reception, Kelsey seeks to explain how states choose to engage with forced migrants (including refugees and asylum-seekers) living within their borders. Focused on the cases of Egypt, Turkey, and Morocco, this is an innovative study in a number of important ways. There’s a vast literature analyzing how rich democracies respond to immigration from the Global South and immigrants living within their borders. Yet Kelsey is interested in understanding the politics of migration within the Global South -- in how Global South states engage with migrants within their own borders.
Scholars have often thought of countries like Egypt or Morocco as mere migration stopovers -- as places that migrants from other parts of the Middle East or Africa pass through on their way to Europe. Kelsey’s investigation launches from the often neglected fact that a large share of migrants never make it to the Global North, and that the stopover often becomes the de facto destination, a place where millions of migrants and refugees end up making their lives.
So how do reluctant Global South host states respond to these large, uninvited, semi-permanent populations of migrants? In some cases, host states repress and exclude: they restrict access to labor markets and services, detain migrants and refugees, and deport them. In other cases, states seek to integrate migrants, granting them basic rights, assistance, and access to work.
But often, Kelsey argues, states choose neither to repress nor to integrate. Instead, they adopt a policy approach that Kelsey calls “strategic indifference.”Under strategic indifference, states deliberately choose not to formally grant residency permits, access to employment, or services; but they tolerate informal labor-market participation, while declining to enforce residency rules and allowing NGOs and international agencies to provide basic services.
We talk with Kelsey about why states construct deliberately ambiguous policy responses -- what’s in it for them -- and about how a regime of strategic indifference shapes the day to day lives of migrants and refugees.
Kelsey also talks to us about her two years of intensive fieldwork in the three countries: about how a policy pattern that had been little-noted in the literature came into focus as she watched developments on the ground; how an ethnographic sensibility shaped the way she attended to the world around her; and how she’s grappled with the ethical quandaries of conducting research with vulnerable populations in the Global South as a citizen of the affluent North.
As always, you can find references to all of the academic works that we discuss in the episode on the episode page on our website.

The Gravitational Pull of Europe's Far Right, with Tarik Abou-Chadi Jan 18, 2021

Show notes

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Tarik Abou-Chadi, an Assistant Professor of political science at the University of Zürich, about how far-right parties have reshaped politics in advanced democracies.
Consider the dilemma faced by mainstream political parties of right and the left in much of Europe. Center-right, conservative and social democratic parties dominated European politics for most of the postwar era, consistently winning large proportions of the vote at election time. Over the last two decades, however, far-right parties running on nationalist, anti-immigration platforms have expanded their appeal to become formidable electoral competitors, steadily taking votes and parliamentary seats from mainstream parties and complicating the task of forming traditional governing coalitions. (The same is true of Green and far left parties, but that’s a topic for another episode.)
Center-right and center-left parties face a strategic dilemma in deciding how to respond to the threat posed by the far right. One strategy available to mainstream parties is to maintain their more moderate positions on issues like immigration while making a case against the xenophobia and nativism that the far right is peddling or trying to change the subject to other issues. Alternatively, mainstream parties can try to coopt the far right’s policy stance, taking more nationalist, anti-immigrant positions themselves in an attempt to take the wind out of the far right’s sails. Which of these strategies have most mainstream European parties adopted? And do those strategies work?
Dr. Tarik Abou-Chadi is among those currently doing the most interesting and sophisticated research on the politics of the far right. We talk with Tarik about two of his recent papers: a 2020 article with Werner Krause in the British Journal of Political Science on the causal effect of radical-right party success on mainstream parties’ issues positions; and a working paper with Krause and Denis Cohen evaluating the success of mainstream parties’ efforts to accommodate far-right policy stances. Together, these two papers paint a picture of how mainstream parties respond to the challenge posed by the far right and of the limits of trying to beat the far right at its own game.
On the whole, this is a conversation about how the radical right has shifted the terms of political debate across Europe, and about how the far right can achieve its policy goals, such as clamp-downs on immigration, without even entering government. We also talk with Tarik about the empirical strategies that he and his coauthors use to address difficult challenges of causal inference: in particular, the regression-discontinuity design (RDD) that they employ. We discuss the logic and benefits of the RDD strategy as well as some of its limits in allowing us to draw generalizable inferences.
Be sure to check out Tarik’s terrific podcast, Transformation of European Politics, including his interviews with authors discussed in this episode: Rafaela Dancygier, Tamar Mitts and Cas Mudde.
The scholarly works discussed in this episode can be found on the episode page on our

How Strong Legislatures Emerge, with Ken Opalo Jan 04, 2021

Show notes

In this episode, we talk about how strong legislatures emerge. When we think about what makes a political system a democracy, we usually think of one key ingredient as being an elected legislature that can constrainthe executive: an elected assembly that serves as a checkon executive whim and has the ultimate say on core matters of public policy. But where do strong legislatures come from?
As political scientists, we commonly tell ourselves an origin story -- first set out by Douglass North and Barry Weingast -- about the emergence of parliamentary strength in 17th century England that goes something like this: the monarchy needed to borrow money. But before wealthy elites were willing to lend to the Crown, they wanted to make sure that they would be paid back. Thus, parliamentary prominence arose as a way for the Crown to credibly tie its own hands and for elites to hold the executive to its commitments. A strong parliament emerged from the underlying balance of bargaining power between the sovereign and elites.
Our guest today, Dr. Ken Opalo, an assistant professor of government at Georgetown University, argues that this paradigmatic origin story does not travel very well beyond Europe. In his 2019 book, Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Postcolonial Legacies, Ken examines how strong and weak legislatures emerged as African nations transitioned from autocracy to multi-party democracy. The book centers on the comparison of Kenya and Zambia, two countries that democratized in the early 1990s, shifting from single-party to multi-party rule. Both countries had had open legislatures during the postcolonial, authoritarian period, legislatures that are now elected through multi-party competition. But while multi-party elections turned Kenya’s legislature into a strong assembly that frequently bucks the president, Zambia’s democratic legislature follows the president’s lead about as frequently as it did during the authoritarian period.
We talk with Ken about why democracy generated a strong legislature in one country but continued executive dominance in the other. This is, fundamentally, a conversation about how to theorize and study institutional development as democracy emerges in postcolonial settings. Ken explains what is distinctive about such contexts and why models of the rise of executive constraint derived from the European experience do such a poor job of explaining outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. We also talk about why scholars have missedkeyinstitutional variation across African autocracies: variation that is not picked up in standard cross-national datasets but that has crucial implications for legislative development once democracy takes hold.
The scholarly works discussed in this episode can be found on our website.