Scope Conditions Podcast - Alan Jacobs and Yang-Yang Zhou

Latest Episodes:

Public Education as an Autocratic Project, with Agustina Paglayan Dec 14, 2020

Show notes

In this conversation, we talk with Dr. Agustina Paglayan, an assistant professor of political science at UC San Diego, about her project “The Dark Side of Education,” an examination of the spread of mass primary schooling around the world. Paglayan recently published an article on the topic in the American Political Science Review and has a larger book project underway expanding on this research.
In this project, Paglayan seeks to challenge a great deal of what we think we know about the spread of primary education around the world. Common understandings of the expansion of public education take a pretty benign view of its origins. Previous scholarship has tended to argue that states expanded primary schooling to invest in human capital, to redistribute to the poor, or to promote economic development. Scholars have also contended that the spread of education was largely a democratic project, as a response to popular demands following democratization.
Paglayan has quite a different story to tell about how primary schooling became broadly available around the world. Drawing on a wealth of historical evidence, she argues that it wasn’t democrats but dictators who extended primary education to the masses. Moreover, in most cases, she contends, governments expanded primary schooling not as a concession to the poor, but as a tool for silencing dissent, undermining rebellion, and reinforcing their hold on power.
In our conversation, Paglayan advances these arguments by tying together rich knowledge of the cases she studies (such as 19th-century Prussia, Chile, and the Jim Crow American South), an original comparative-historical dataset on the expansion of education around the world, and careful thinking about drawing causal inferences from cross-national, time-series data. This was a fascinating discussion that changed the way we think about the politics of education.
A figure from Paglayan's APSR article and the scholarly works discussed in this episode can be found on our website.

Middle-Class Guardians of Autocracy, with Bryn Rosenfeld Nov 23, 2020

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In this episode, we talk with Dr. Bryn Rosenfeld, an Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University, about her new book, The Autocratic Middle Class: How State Dependency Reduces the Demand for Democracy(Princeton University Press).
This book’s starting point is a puzzling observation that Rosenfeld made during years conducting research in the post-Soviet region. She noticed that, in places like Russia and Kazakstan, the rising middle class was not a commercial bourgeosie or a growing cohort of private-sector white-collar professionals. Rather, in much of the post-Soviet world, the middle class was composed largely of public sector employees. In other words, as compared to what we see in most established democracies, where much of the middle class is deeply embedded in the market, the post-Soviet middle class was much more heavily reliant on the state for its livelihood.
In her book, Rosenfeld explores the implications of a state-dependent middle class for the prospects for democracy in a region dominated by autocrats. A long research tradition in comparative politics casts a large, educated middle class as a key constituency for democracy -- as a group that demands political reform and the protection of individual rights.
But what happens when authoritarian governments pursue top-down strategies of economic modernization, leaving the rising professional class dependent on the regime for its continued prosperity? How democratic is a middle class that prospers in a dictator’s employ? And, more broadly, how do the prospects for democratization of authoritarian regimes depend on the basic structure of the economy?
These are the questions Rosenfeld’s work grapples with. In this conversation, Rosenfeld outlines the puzzle motivating her work, the argument at the center of the book, and the research design she uses to test that argument. One particular area we focus on is the empirical challenge of determining how a person’s political beliefs are shaped by the nature of their employment, given that individuals “select into” occupations for reasons that may be related to their political views. Rosenfeld explains how she tackles this inferential problem. We also explore the implications of Rosenfeld’s findings for paths out of autocracy: if the state-dependency of the middle class is the problem, can privatization pave the road to democracy?
You can find references to scholarly work discussed in the episode on our website, here.

The Economics of Playing the “Identity Card,” with Nikhar Gaikwad Nov 09, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Nikhar Gaikwad, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, about his book project on what happens when identity politics and the economy collide.
Many debates in political science revolve around the question of what matters more: identity or economics. For instance, debates about the drivers of populism often revolve around the questions of whether populism emerges from nativist, ethnocentric attitudes or from the economic anxieties generated by globalization.
A distinctive feature of Gaikwad’s project is that it examines how identities and material interests interact and shape political strategies jointly. He takes as his starting point the fact that parties and candidates in diverse societies will often choose to play the "identity card” to boost their support among a religious, ethnic, caste or other group that’s in the majority. In India, for instance, certain politicians and parties have come to power in part through strident appeals to Hindu nationalism and the vilification of Muslims.
However, these “identity entrepreneurs,” Gaikwad argues, find that identity politics is not by itself sufficient to guarantee electoral success. Rather, parties running on ethnocentrism find that they simultaneously need to use economic policy to build winning electoral coalitions. Gaikwad’s analysis centers on figuring out how ethnocentric parties allocate economic benefits: perhaps surprisingly, Gaikwad finds, those parties that use identity-based appeals to flatter cultural majorities often direct economic benefits to the cultural minority.
An important takeaway of this conversation is the importance of analyzing cultural and material politics jointly. Ifwe want to make sense of identity politics in culturally divided societies, then we need to understand economic policy -- and vice versa.
In this conversation, Gaikwad explains to us the logic of his argument, and we take in the sweep of the evidence that he brings to bear on it, including a series of case studies, survey experiments, and statistical analyses in the contexts of India, Brazil, and the United States. Among the interesting implications that we explore are how building electoral coalitions in divided societies hinges on tactics of visibility -- on combining brazen cultural appeals with under-the-radar economic policy -- and how the stealth targeting of material benefits can help explain the electoral success of rightwing populists, including India’s Narendra Modi and the U.S.’s Donald Trump. We also talk with Gaikwad about what his argument has to tell us about an apparent reversal of globalization, with the raising of barriers to trade and investment in some parts of the world.
You can find references to scholarly work discussed in the episode on our website, here.

The Upside of Nationalism, with Aram Hur Oct 18, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Aram Hur, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri, about her book project Narratives of Duty: How National Stories Shape Civic Duty in Asia.
Narratives of Duty is a study about the social good that, under the right conditions, can emerge from nationalism. We often think about nationalism today as an exclusionary and pernicious force in politics -- as, for instance, a driver of anti-immigrant sentiment and of conflict between groups or states. Hur’s project examines a potential “upside” to nationalism: the role that nationalism can play in creating a sense of citizen duty and, in turn, in inducing people to contribute to collective social goods. She examines how nationalism can motivate citizens to take costly action in support of the state, such as volunteering to serve in the army, paying their taxes, or contributing to a fiscal rescue during a financial crisis.
To be clear, Hur does not argue that nationalism always and everywhere generates a willingness to contribute to the common good. Rather, she is interested in understanding the conditions under which it does so. She contends that whether nationalism boosts civic duty depends, in particular, on the relationship between national identities and states: in particular, on whether or not national groups see the state as representing their nation.
Hur is especially interested in what nationalism can do for democracies. Unlike autocracies, which can readily turn to hard-edged forms of coercion, democracies rely heavily on voluntary compliance, making a sense of civic duty an especially valuable source of resilience.
In our conversation with Hur, we trace out the logic of her argument, think through its implications for democratic stability, and talk through the diverse range of research designs that the project brings together. Centered on a comparison between South Korea and Taiwan, the study combines evidence from in-depth qualitative interviews, field and survey experiments, and observational survey data, including an extension to the settings of eastern and western Germany. We also discuss what Hur’s argument can tell us about South Korea’s success in combating COVID-19, as well as how the country’s tight nation-state linkage creates new challenges in an era of falling fertility and increasing immigration.
You can find references to scholarly work discussed in the episode on our website, here.

Forging Democracy out of the Trauma of Repression, with Elizabeth Nugent Oct 04, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Elizabeth Nugent, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University, about her new book, After Repression: How Polarization Derails Democratic Transition(Princeton University Press).
Nugent is interested in authoritarian regimes that have collapsed in the face of popular uprising -- and specifically with what comes next. The demise of a dictatorship does not necessarily lmean the start of a democracy: one autocratic regime can fall only to replaced by another dictatorship. It is in fact relatively rare that autocratic collapse results in the establishment of a stable democracy.
In her new book, Nugent is interested in figuring out what makes the difference. When a dictatorship falls, why do we sometimes get democracy and sometimes more autocracy? She focuses specifically on the aftermath of the Arab Spring: the string of popular uprisings against authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa in the early 2010s. In particular, the book examines the toppling of the Mubarak regime in Egypt and the collapse of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia.
The Egypt-Tunisia comparison is a striking one. Before and during the Arab Spring, these two countries looked similar in many respects. Both were ruled by dictators who had been in power for decades; both regimes were unseated by weeks of sustained mass protest; and both were replaced at first by members of the democratic opposition. Moreover, the politics of both countries revolved around the divide between Islamism and secularism.
After the Arab Spring, however, the political systems’ paths diverged dramatically. After a brief flirtation with democracy, Egypt quickly descended back into strongman rule while Tunisians set up a quite vibrant multiparty democracy that still survives today.
So what was it that allowed Tunisian society -- but not Egyptian society -- to support democratic norms and institutions? Nugent argues that the answer lies in how the old regime in each country wielded repressive power and the mark that repression left on identities and organizations among the two countries’ democratic oppositions.
In this episode, we unpack Nugent’s argument about the legacies of repression and about the evidence that she brings to bear on that argument, including comparative-historical analysis, in-depth interviews with opposition members, and inventive lab experiments. We discuss elements of the research process including how she decided to bring social psychology into the study of democratization and how she engaged with her research participants about highly sensitive and traumatic experiences. We also talk about what historical analysis brings to her explanation: why understanding British and French colonialism can help make sense of regime change in the 2010s. And we touch on possible parallels between coercive institutions in autocracies and repressive state practices in democracies.
You can find references to Elizabeth Nugent's work and other relevant material on our website, here.

The Promise and Limits of Intergroup Contact, with Salma Mousa Sep 21, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, we talk about improving relations between social groups. For decades, social scientists and policymakers have been examining whether meaningful social interaction between groups can help reduce prejudice and conflict, or what’s been known as the “contact hypothesis.”
Whether social interaction breeds tolerance has implications, of course, for a huge range of political outcomes: for instance, for the risks of violence, civil war, and genocide; patterns of discrimination; and how societies respond to increased flows of immigration. It’s only recently, however, that social scientists have been experimentally testing the contact hypothesis in real-world, high-stakes settings.
Our guest is Dr. Salma Mousa, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Immigration Policy Lab. Mousa's research uses field and natural experiments to examine the possibility that contactbetween groups can foster both more positive attitudes and more positive behaviors across group lines.
We talk with Mousa about two recent papers of hers that delve into real-world settings to examine how and under what conditions intergroup contact can help. The first paper, recently published as the cover article in the journal Science,tests the contact hypothesis under especially tough conditions: in the context of Christian-Muslim tensions in post-conflict Iraq. Working among communities displaced by the war with ISIS, Mousa conducted an innovative field experiment in which she randomly assigned Christian soccer teams to either receive additional Christian players or additional Muslim players for a season — and then she observed whether this changed the Christian team members’ attitudes and behaviors towards Muslims.
In the second paper, Mousa examines the effects of virtual contact -- between school children of different ethnicities and nationalities -- to see whether the benefits of contact can be achieved online.
We discuss the substance of Mousa's findings, the research designs she deploys, and, more generally, how to make sense of and draw policy lessons from findings in the field of group conflict. Among the issues we discuss are the difference between generating cross-group tolerance among individuals who directly interact with one another and producing generalized tolerance toward an entire social group; why it may be easier to change behaviors toward outgroups than to change attitudes; and the challenge of scaling up carefully designed experimental treatments into society-wide policies that breed more positive intergroup relations.
For references to all academic works mentioned in this episode, please visit our website at scopeconditionspodcast.com.