Abstract:

Recent research in both political science and economics has stressed the importance of the state for providing public goods, curbing civil conict, and fostering economic growth. Moreover, it is now widely recognized that areas where the state is contested, limited, or absent can serve as havens for transnational terrorists, drug cartels, human tra_ckers, pirates, or insurgents. Yet, despite the centrality of the state as a variable of interest, quantitative research has been hampered by disagreements over how to conceptualize state strength and how to measure it in a credible way. To address these problems, in this paper we develop and operationalize a new measure of state presence that aims to capture the extent to which state institutions, agents and rules inuence the decision-making of citizens residing within national boundaries. We present an extensive series of validity checks to distinguish our idea of state presence from other related but distinct concepts in the social science literature. Finally, we demonstrate the potential for our new measure to advance quantitive research on questions of substantive importance in political science by deploying it in a statistical analysis to disentangle competing explanations for civil war onset.

Abstract:
Why have militarized interventions to curtail violence by drug cartels had wildly divergent results? In the past six years, state crackdowns drove a nine-fold increase in cartel-state violence in Mexico, versus a two-thirds decrease in Brazil. Prevailing analyses of drug wars as a criminal subtype of insurgency provide little traction, because they elide differences in rebels’ and cartels’ aims. Cartels, I argue, fight states not to conquer territory or political control, but to coerce state actors and influence policy outcomes. The empirically predominant channel is violent corruption—threatening enforcers while negotiating bribes. A formal model reveals that greater state repression raises bribe prices, leading cartels to fight back whenever (a) corruption is sufficiently rampant, and (b) repression is insufficiently conditional on cartels’ use of violence. Variation in conditionality helps explain observed outcomes: switching to conditional repression pushed Brazilian cartels into nonviolent strategies, while Mexico’s war “without distinctions” inadvertently made fighting advantageous.

Abstract:
In order to successfully battle organized crime, governments require a certain degree of citizens’ support. Governments are sometimes able to influence citizens’ opinions, but sometimes they are not. Under what circumstances do pro-government frames influence citizens’ opinions? Will individuals who are victims of crime be equally sensitive to frames than those who are not? We argue that crime victimization desensitizes citizens to pro-government frames. This further complicates governments’ fights against criminals, creating a vicious circle of insecurity, distrust, and frustrated policy interventions. To test our argument, we conducted a frame experiment embedded in a nationwide survey in Mexico. The empirical evidence supports our argument in most circumstances; yet desensitization is moderated by love media-exposure and identification with the president’s party.