Category: Uncategorized

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Pre-Electoral Opposition Coalitions in Authoritarian Regimes

PI: Ozlem Tuncel Gurlek, Ph.D. Candidate, Georgia State University

Grant Fund and Grant Amount: $2,500, William A. Steiger Fund for Legislative Studies

Project Abstract: As of 2021, more than 68 percent of the world population lives under autocracies. International organizations and think tanks struggle tenaciously to find valuable and applicable mechanisms and strategies to facilitate a transition to democracy while creeping authoritarianism threatens every corner of the world. Contemporary autocracies are unique in the sense that they heavily depend on political parties and elections. This project interrogates the role of opposition parties in these competitive autocratic regimes, particularly examining these parties’ ability to unite against the omnipresent autocrats and oust the incumbent to pave the way for a transition to democracy. This project seeks to understand why some opposition parties in competitive autocratic regimes are able to successfully form a pre-electoral coalition (PEC), while others fail to coordinate. What explains the cooperation of opposition parties in regimes where electoral politics is an uneven playing field, and harassment of opposition is a ubiquitous practice? In this research, I argue that opposition parties that successfully resolve differences among them and resolve conflicts within each party are more likely to form a coalition before elections. I rely on a mixture of evidence to corroborate this theory. I build an original dataset on coalitions, test my findings in disparate parts of the world, and focus on the Turkish opposition parties as a case study. Ultimately, this approach helps me to develop our knowledge on opposition strategies, reversing democratic backsliding, and the survival of authoritarian regimes.

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The Persuasive Power of Black Women

PIs: Paul Testa, Assistant Professor, Brown University; Karra McCray, Ph.D. Candidate, Brown University; Kylee Britzman, Assistant Professor, Lewis Clark State University; Tarah Williams, Assistant Professor, Allegheny College

Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $1,309, Women & Politics Fund

Project Abstract: Movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter rely on social media to share individual experiences and personal pleas to galvanize others to take action for social change. The success of these messages depends upon the reach and persuasiveness of their messengers. Due to existing power disparities, race, gender, and the intersection of race and gender, can affect the reach and persuasiveness of messages. Black women may be uniquely trusted messengers for some groups, but they may also have more difficulty getting other groups to listen or to be persuaded. If some people are more or less likely to hear and respond to calls for reform depending on when they are made by a Black woman, a white person, or Black man, this creates both challenges and opportunities for sustaining coalitions for change. Different responses to social movement messengers could also lead to some interests being overlooked by movements and by the broader public. Our research will use qualitative interviews with Black women activists and a choice-based survey experimental design to assess whether people listen to and are convinced by social movement messages from Black women as compared to white women, Black men, and white men. This project has implications for social movement strategy but also broader implications for how we communicate with one another and how we convey who has authority.

Karra McCray
Tarah Williams
Paul Testa
Kylee Britzman
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Enver Hoxha’s Grand Experiment on the Greeks of Albania: The Effects of Communist-era Ethnic Engineering on Ethnopolitical Identity Compliance During and After Dictatorship

PI: Mary Shiraef, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Notre Dame

Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $2,500, William A. Steiger Fund for Legislative Studies

Project Abstract: Did communist-era policies toward minority groups decisively engineer contemporary identity landscapes? This paper examines personal and political identity production processes sparked by Soviet-era ethnic identity engineering. Stalinist border-making departed sharply from the “melting pot” model of the Western world by recognizing minority groups within regimes’ borders. These policies allowed for and even resourced minority identities, but also disregarded or repressed them in territories deemed for the majority ethnic group. The recognition policies provide a control comparison for this study’s goal to learn the long-term impacts of coerced assimilation in Soviet contexts. I hypothesize that ethnic engineering effectively resulted in transmission trends of minority groups away from their ancestral identities in both the communist-era public record and in private-public gravestones in the post-communist period––albeit to a far lesser extent. In terms of long-term back-lash of the policy, I posit that those who complied publicly with the ethnic designation of the regime––but not in the long-term––were also more likely in the post-communist period to carry anti-socialist political attitudes than those recognized as in the minority. I test these hypotheses at the southern border of Albania with Greece, where the communist leader’s recognition of minority groups was long enough in duration and applied strictly enough to expect divergence in the resulting populations’ identities. I draw my analysis from a differences-in-differences design applied on a hand-coded dataset from Albania’s internal communist records and from cemeteries throughout Albania’s districts neighboring the Albania-Greece border, paired against pre-communist data for the same districts.