Luis Schenoni - New Publication in International Studies Review

C&C member Luis Schenoni, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Political Science, has published an article in International Studies Review, a flagship journal of the International Studies Association. The article is co-authored with Kelly Morrison (University of Tennessee) and Anibal Perez-Liñán (University of Notre Dame).

In their article Compliance in Time: Lessons from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the three authors integrate the scholarship on compliance with international human rights courts to reflect upon how the literature approaches delays and compliance cycles. The study introduces two metrics to facilitate the interpretation of delays (the yearly probability of compliance and the expected time to compliance) and shows how scholars can reconstruct life cycles of compliance using machine-learning tools. Finally, the authors illustrate the utility of this approach with an analysis of a novel dataset including all cases decided by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) between 1989 and 2019.

This is part of a larger project led by Anibal Perez-Liñán, Director of the Kellogg Institute, involving several academic institutions and stakeholders, including the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) itself.

Zeynep Bulutgil wins 2023 ISA Book Award

C&C member H. Zeynep Bulutgil, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, has won the 2023 Book Award of the Religion and International Relations Section of the International Studies Association (ISA).

Her book the The Origins of Secular Institutions: Ideas, Timing, and Organization (Oxford University Press) makes major contributions to the literatures on religion and politics as well as modern state formation. In the book, she develops an original theory that links the early dissemination of Enlightenment ideas and organizational timing to the emergence of secular institutions. She then supports these arguments by combining statistical analysis of original historical data with comparative historical analysis of countries in Europe (France, Spain, The United Kingdom) and the Middle East/North Africa (Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia).

Partisanship, protection, and punishment - Rod Abouharb's new article in RIPE

C&C member Rod Abouharb, Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, has co-authored a new article with Bernhard Reinsberg who is presenting at C&C this term. The article has now been published in the Review of International Political Economy and is available here

In their article, the authors try to better understand how governments seek political advantage during economically turbulent times. In particular, they wanted to investigate how governments allocate the burden of structural adjustment programs sponsored by international financial institutions. The authors argue that governments allocate the burdens of these programs strategically to protect their own partisan supporters while imposing adjustment costs upon the partisan supporters of their opponents. 

For their study, they used individual-level data from the Afrobarometer survey from 12 Sub-Saharan African countries, showing that opposition supporters have consistently more negative evaluations and experiences of IMF structural adjustment programs compared to supporters of the government. Partisan differences in evaluations are greater when governments have greater scope for distributional politics, such as in the public sector and where programs entail more quantitative performance criteria, which leave governments discretion about how to achieve IMF program targets. 

In the end, these results emphasise the significant role of borrowing governments in the implementation of IMF-mandated policy measures. They also stress the benefits of reducing the number of IMF conditions in limiting the scope for harmful distributive politics.

Fifth Edition of the PhD Workshop

Members of the Conflict & Change research cluster are organizing the fifth edition of the PhD workshop at the Department of Political Science, University College London.

The workshop is scheduled for 20th - 21st February 2023. As in previous years, the workshop provides a great opportunity for early career researchers to share their work, get feedback, and interact with other conflict scholars. You can apply via our Call for Abstracts until 5th December.

This year’s workshop is being organized by Conflict and Change members Sigrid Weber, Finn Klebe, Yilin Su, and Michael Jacobs. You can read the call and submit your abstracts below.

Zeynep Bulutgil Publishes Article in Journal of Peace Research

C&C member Zeynep Bulutgil, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, has co-authored an article on “Inequality, elections, and communal riots in India” with Neeraj Prasad, who presented at C&C last term. For the article, the authors looked at the relationship between inequality and mobilizational aspects of violence in electoral settings. They found that when ethnic inequality is low, ethnic identity tends not to be politically salient. In such settings, ethnonationalist politicians use small-scale violent measures aimed at inducing ethnic voting.

In addition to studying the electoral context, the article also sheds light on the broader issue of communal riots and how this specific type of political violence relates to others. In relation to that, the article shows that communal riots do not conform to the standard expectation from studies of large-scale violence that high inequality between ethnic groups increases the likelihood of violence. The authors thus argue that their findings highlight the importance of conceptualizing communal riots, and potentially other types of small-scale political violence, as a separate class of events with their own internal logic.

The article has now been published in the Journal of Peace Research and is available open access here https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00223433221091307