When authoritarian-era elites return to positions of power under democracy, what are the implications for the quality of democracy? We investigate this question using an original dataset that tracks former authoritarian elites’ capture of high-level posts under democracy across Latin America from 1900 to 2015. We find that when authoritarian-era elites capture a wide range of posts across disparate government branches – spanning the executive, legislature, judiciary, military, and local elected office – such “elite dispersion” undercuts the quality of democracy. It also harms specific dimensions of democracy such as accountability, openness of competition, breadth of inclusion, and egalitarianism. These results are robust to prominent alternative explanations of the quality of democracy, and in particular, explanations that underscore the importance of formal organizations and institutions such as autonomous militaries, dominant political parties, and holdover autocratic constitutions. Elite dispersion matters for the quality of democracy even after controlling for these more visible channels of former authoritarian elite influence.

Michael Albertus is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago. His research interests include political regimes, inequality and redistribution, clientelism, and civil conflict. He has published two books, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform (2015, Cambridge University Press) and Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy (2018, Cambridge University Press), and a host of articles in outlets such as the American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Comparative Political Studies. He also writes regularly for public audiences in outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs.

 

Abstract:

 

What explains sustained mobilization — social movement resilience — in the face of severe autocratic repression? This question is especially relevant given the recent uptick in protest movements across the world. We examine this question through the case of Sudan’s popular uprising, which lasted from December 2018 until the country began a formal transition to democracy in July 2019. Drawing on in-depth field research during and after the uprising, we look at the role of organizational legitimacy, elite unity, and the evolution of repression evasion tactics. We find that the movement’s organizational form and mobilization tactics coevolved with the actions of the security apparatus. 

 

Speaker Bio:

 

Mai Hassan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and a current visiting fellow at CASBS. Her work has been published in various outlets, including the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Democracy, and the Journal of Politics. She received her PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2014.

 

 

 

 

 

Abstract:
Kristen Looney will be discussing her forthcoming work, Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia (Cornell U. Press 2020). This book tackles the question of how countries achieve rural development and offers a new way of thinking about East Asia’s political economy that challenges the developmental state paradigm. Through a comparison of Taiwan (1950s–1970s), South Korea (1950s–1970s), and China (1980s–2000s), the research shows that different types of development outcomes—improvements in agricultural production, rural living standards, and the village environment—were realized to different degrees, at different times, and in different ways. Looney argues that rural modernization campaigns played a central role in the region and that divergent development outcomes can be attributed to the interplay between campaigns and institutions. Relevant to political science, economic history, rural sociology, and Asian studies, the book enriches our understanding of state-led development and agrarian change.

Speaker Bio:

Kristen Looney is an assistant professor of Asian Studies and Government at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on Chinese and Comparative Politics. Her research is on rural development and governance and has previously appeared in The China Quarterly, The China Journal, and Current History. Her first book is forthcoming with Cornell University Press in spring 2020.

Abstract:

In the face of mounting challenges from criminal activity and citizen demands for improved public safety, Mexico has undertaken significant efforts at police reform. Those efforts would presumably enhance the capacity of police forces to fight and deter crime. This paper explores the quantity and quality of police in Mexico, a federation where multi-tier government makes incentives for police professionalization more challenging than in unitary systems. The paper calculates, the true size of police forces, comparing them to all legal specialists in the use of violence, including private security guards at homes and businesses. It then estimates the implicit wage incentives given to experience and human capital formation in the different types of police corporations during the Calderón and Peña Nieto presidential administrations. Finally, we use a municipal cross section to gain further insight into the effects of police professionalization on interpersonal violence, as measured by homicide rates. The overall findings suggest that improving policing in Mexico is not merely a question of adding manpower or spending more budgetary resources, but of changing career incentives for greater professionalization.

 

Speaker Bio:

Alberto Diaz-Cayeros joined the FSI faculty in 2013 after serving for five years as the director of the Center for US-Mexico studies at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D at Duke University in 1997. He was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford from 2001-2008, before which he served as an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Diaz-Cayeros has also served as a researcher at Centro de Investigacion Para el Desarrollo, A.C. in Mexico from 1997-1999. His work has focused on federalism, poverty and violence in Latin America, and Mexico in particular. He has published widely in Spanish and English. His book Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 (reprinted 2016). His latest book (with Federico Estevez and Beatriz Magaloni) is: The Political Logic of Poverty Relief Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico. His work has primarily focused on federalism, poverty and economic reform in Latin America, and Mexico in particular, with more recent work addressing crime and violence, youth-at-risk, and police professionalization.