Comparative Political Research Research Articles

Life after exile: Introducing a new dataset on post-exile fate

Recent research in international relations and comparative politics has highlighted the post-tenure fate of leaders, particularly exile. Scholars view exile either as a punishment or a “golden parachute” offering a safe exit with potential future power. To assess which perspective aligns with reality, we developed a dataset tracking exiled leaders’ fates across three periods: during exile, upon returning home, and beyond. Our findings reveal significant variations, but the majority of exiled leaders eventually return home and resume power. This suggests a need to reconsider research that groups exile with punishments like imprisonment or execution.

The Problem of Protecting the Rights and Legitimate Interests of the Child in the Family and Outside It

Abstract Protecting children's rights and interests, especially within families, is crucial globally. Effective laws and enforcement are needed to ensure their safety and prevent violence, both offline and online. Kazakhstan's efforts in this regard, including legal protection for motherhood and childhood, are important. All of the above allowed for formulating the general purpose of the study – a comprehensive systematic examination of the protection of the subjective rights and legitimate interests of the child in family legal relations and in surrounding society (using the example of the Republic of Kazakhstan). The results were obtained using the tools of theoretical and methodological research of publications devoted to the problems and issues of observance and protection of children's rights and freedoms at the national and global levels, methods of comparative legal and comparative political research, content analysis of official documents, etc. In the study, key issues regarding the protection of children's rights in Kazakhstan were identified, including violence, neglect, and juvenile delinquency. It highlighted the growing number of appeals for the protection of violated children's rights and emphasized the urgent need for improvement in the child protection system. Promising areas for development include enhancing social services, reducing violence in families and institutions, improving legal protection against sexual harassment, and promoting child-friendly activities in preschool education. The study is of both theoretical interest and practical importance for various stakeholders involved in child welfare and protection. The research has practical value and originality in posing individual questions; it is aimed at examining in-depth the most important problems of maternity, family, and childhood protection in modern Kazakhstan.

Rethinking Measurement Equivalence in Comparative Political Research

A growing number of studies test key cultural constructs used in comparative political research for invariance across countries, only to declare these constructs incomparable if the invariance tests fail. The assumption underlying this kind of conclusion is that between-country differences in within-country factor solutions reflect cross-cultural inequivalence of the respective survey items. Using a Bayesian approach, we explore variation in measurement quality across countries focusing on sexual emancipation. We find that between-country differences in factor solutions reflect little more than imbalances in within-country dispersions of the construct items. As we demonstrate, discrete and bounded response scales used in standard surveys enforce a mathematical relationship between extreme country means, low within-country dispersions, and weak factor solutions. We formalize this insight by introducing a between–within model of cultural variation. Our contribution calls into question the practice of declaring constructs to be incomparable based on failed invariance tests.

Reciprocity, Incentives, and Off-Ramps: Faculty–Undergraduate Collaboration and Comparative Politics Research

ABSTRACTWhat are the opportunities and challenges of faculty–undergraduate collaborative scholarship that involves student participation at every stage of the research process? Drawing on interviews with comparative politics faculty members and undergraduate students, this article discusses the themes of reciprocity, incentives, and “off-ramps.” First, we find that an unequal division of labor can give way to a more reciprocal work dynamic as long-term projects unfold. Second, we consider the use of incremental incentives to sustain student motivation. Third, we propose the creation of off-ramps to allow an undergraduate to gracefully exit a project early. Grounded in these themes, we argue that—with a few guardrails—faculty members and undergraduate students can benefit from long-term collaborative research projects, including those that involve fieldwork or that seek to publish peer-reviewed articles.

A confiscated trajectory of secularism: revisiting the critical case of Turkey

ABSTRACT One mark of the rising research field of secularism and religion is that the field itself moved from area studies towards mainstream social science. This move can be traced through the increasing significance of Turkey. Turkey’s AKP was presented as a liberal and moderate challenge to radical Kemalist secularism in Turkish Studies, then analytical pillars of research in comparative politics and political theory relied on this presentation. After AKP’s authoritarian turn, how can we reflect on its past narration as liberal and moderate? As opposed to the thesis of rupture between the early and the late AKP, this article develops the thesis of confiscation. First, I resituate Kemalist secularism vis-à-vis French secularism with comparative history. I argue that institutionally it’s a limited, not a radical, secularism. Then, I examine gradual institutional changes during the AKP with statistics, court decisions, legislation and parliamentary discussions, and demonstrate that limited Kemalist secular institutions ease the way for AKP’s will to religionize society and the state. My analysis tackles a central thesis in the literature: secular institutions can make reasonable accommodations of religion without losing their own core. I show that in Turkey, accommodations of religion turn into confiscation of secular institutions.

Modeling Spatial Heterogeneity and Historical Persistence: Nazi Concentration Camps and Contemporary Intolerance

A wealth of recent research in comparative politics examines how spatial variation in historical conditions shapes modern political outcomes. In an article in the American Political Science Review, Homola, Pereira, and Tavits argue that Germans who live nearer to former Nazi concentration camps are more likely to display out-group intolerance. Clarifying the conceptual foundations of posttreatment bias and reviewing the historical record on postwar state creation in Germany, we argue that state-level differences confound the relationship between distance to camps and out-group intolerance. Using publicly available European Values Survey data and electoral results from 2017, we find no consistent evidence that distance to camps is related to contemporary values. Our findings have implications for literatures on historical persistence, causal inference with spatial data, Holocaust studies, and outgroup tolerance.

“Платформа перемен” (Часть вторая)

In the article, the author continues to acquaint the reader with representatives of the IMEMO scientific elite – academicians and corresponding members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who lead the most important areas of research at the Institute. Research teams engaged in the development of specific problems are united around them. Academician Aleksey Arbatov, prominent researcher and politician, deputy of the State Duma in 1994–2003, heads the IMEMO Center for International Security, which he has created. Its developments are implemented in real politics, and are also highly appreciated in the national and international expert community. Irina Semenenko, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, heads the Center for Comparative Socio-Economic and Political Studies at the Institute. She is known as a major specialist in the field of comparative political research, a comparative analysis of socio-political changes in the modern world. In the sphere of her professional attention there are tendencies of political transformations in Western countries and Russia. I. Semenenko has priority in developing the theory and methodology for studying identity as a resource for social development. Sergey Afontsev, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, began his career at IMEMO as a laboratory assistant and has come a long way to the position of Deputy Director, Head of the Department of Economic Theory. He is known as one of the most authoritative experts on fundamental and applied economic problems. His professional interests include a wide range of issues: international political economy, economic and political models for analyzing the processes of economic policy formation, managing global economic processes, applied issues of foreign trade and industrial policy, attracting investments and managing economic specialization, Russian-European economic relations. Another major theoretical economist, Rostislav Kapelyushnikov, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has been fruitfully working at IMEMO for a long time: he is one of the best specialists in Russia in the new institutional economics, the Russian labor market, and methodological problems of economic science. All these specialists are the pride of IMEMO. They largely determine the high rating of the Institute as the most authoritative think tank in Russia in studying the problems of the modern world development.

Troubled Comparative Trajectories and the Statistical Construction of Disempowered Arab and Muslim Women Subjects

AbstractSince 9/11, a number of scholars added gender as a new variable to explain how economic, political, and/or social developments in the Middle East have diverged from developments elsewhere. These studies relied almost exclusively on statistical analysis and frequently discounted much of the extant literature, especially the more feminist and historically sensitive and in-depth qualitative works on the subject matter. Almost uniformly, the point of departure for many of these works was the disempowered socioeconomic and/or political status of Arab/Muslim women. Most of the scholars of these works had no gender expertise and had never written on women previously. Regardless, these works spawned an important discussion in the field of comparative politics and their scholarly impact has been noteworthy. Such scholarship, however, is not benign.Accordingly, this article seeks to answer two critical questions: How does the work of non-gender specialists of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) come to have such a significant impact on the study of women and politics in the field of comparative politics? How can we approach these research inquiries differently so that expertise, lived realities, and history matter? The article argues that feminist international relations could serve as a critical corrective to this current trajectory of comparative politics research. This corrective also requires a commitment to feminist scholarship that begins with women's lives and seeks to eliminate gender inequality, as well as greater understanding of the composition and changing structure of our disciplinary communities.

Stagnating incomes and preferences for redistribution: The role of absolute and relative experiences

AbstractStagnating incomes have been a widespread concern in advanced democracies over the past decades. However, despite a turn towards dynamic frameworks, the consequences of stagnation on political support for the welfare state are still unclear. This study introduces the distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ income stagnation – that is, experiencing stagnating incomes over time (without reference to other groups) and in relative comparison to other groups – and explores how they shape citizens’ attitudes towards redistribution. I argue that absolute and relative stagnation have opposite effects on redistributive preferences. Contrary to political economy theories, I expect that low absolute income growth reduces demand for redistribution, because it reduces voters’ ability and willingness to afford welfare state policies. Support for this hypothesis is provided in an empirical analysis that combines novel estimates for absolute and relative income stagnation with longitudinal survey data on redistribution preferences in 14 advanced democracies between 1985 and 2018. The distinction between absolute and relative experiences has broader implications for comparative politics research and might contribute to explain why income stagnation and rising inequality have not led to higher political demand for redistributive welfare policy.

Falling from Grace: The Collapse of Ethiopia's Ruling Coalition

Abstract The Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the government party in Ethiopia from 1991 to 2019, was Africa's biggest party in terms of membership base and considered to be the most powerful incumbent on the continent. The factors behind its rapid fall from grace and eventual collapse in 2019 will be put under scrutiny in this article. Comparative political research has pointed to both endogamous and exogamous factors contributing to party instability. Party-specific concerns such as differences in local constituencies, variations in ethnopolitical identities, differences of ideological outlook, and policy preferences are all factors that may lead to a withering of party consensus. Furthermore, the governance structure of the country may also impinge on party stability, because federal models may be more divisive in nature than unitary states. The argument pursued in this article will be to investigate how the origin of the EPRDF's component parties and their ethnopolitical base under the federal system were made relevant in the internal power struggle to claim control of the coalition and hence the government of the land. The article concludes by identifying four key factors contributing to the internal power struggle that led to the demise of the EPRDF: disagreements over ideology; disputes over party bylaws, procedures, and practices; contestation over the federal state model; and finally, the surge of ethnonationalism with intrinsic territorial ambitions.

Bringing the Legislature Back In: Examining the Structural Effects of National Legislatures on Effective Democratic Governance

AbstractExtant research in comparative politics has examined the role of institutional frameworks such as constitutional design, the nature of the electoral systems, parliamentarism and federalism on the quality of governance. Understanding variations on effective democratic governance has assumed a state-centric approach that has largely neglected how strong legislatures can drastically affect political outcomes. This study finds empirical evidence that the strength of national legislatures (in terms of its influence over the executive, institutional autonomy, its specified powers and institutional capacity) is correlated to effective democratic governance as measured by voice and accountability, governmental effectiveness, regulatory quality, control of corruption and rule of law entrenchment based on a cross-national analysis of 150 countries with available data from the period 1996–2016. The results hold even when the sample is restricted to developing countries, where party systems are more likely to be under-institutionalized. A sensitivity analysis also confirms that the relationship between strong legislatures and effective democratic governance is not attenuated or conditioned by its interactive effect with other institutional arrangements. Implications suggest that the substantive strength of national legislatures promotes higher levels of democratic accountability, and that the international community must focus on frameworks that strengthen global legislatures to avert political instability and creeping authoritarianism.

Measurement Invariance of Liberal and Authoritarian Notions of Democracy: Evidence From the World Values Survey and Additional Methodological Considerations

This article offers a gentle introduction to the measurement invariance (MI) literature with a focus on its relevance to comparative political research. It reviews 1) the conceptual foundations of MI; 2) standard procedures of testing for MI in practical applications within the multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA) paradigm; and 3) two novel approaches to MI, Bayesian approximate measurement invariance, and MGCFA alignment optimization, which are especially suitable for dealing with extremely heterogeneous data from large-scale comparative surveys typical for modern political science. It then provides an empirical illustration of the key concepts and methods from the MGCFA-MI literature by applying them to testing for MI of two recently introduced measures of democracy attitudes, so-called liberal and authoritarian notions of democracy, across 60 countries in the sixth round of the World Values Survey. These analyses show that both measures can be considered reliable comparative measures of democratic attitudes, although for different reasons. Finally, this study emphasizes that some survey-based constructs, e.g., authoritarian notions of democracy, do not follow the reflective (correlation-based) logic of construct development. These alternative measures, known as formative measures, do not assume strong correlations between their indicators, for which reason it is inappropriate to test their comparability using the reflective MGCFA approach. Instead, their comparability can be tied to their correlations with theoretically relevant external variables.

Chancellor Wanted! The 2021 German Chancellor Candidates in Context

The announced farewell of long-term Chancellor Angela Merkel after the 2021 Bundestag election, and the ongoing turmoil in the German party system, have created a precarious and unprecedented situation. For the first time ever, there have been three non-incumbent chancellor candidates competing for the job and the legacy of a departing incumbent. Some of the recent developments, such as the nomination of the first Green chancellor candidate and the rifts within the CDU/CSU over their candidate, were notable in their own right. This early assessment puts these developments into perspective by relating the events of 2021 to historical precedents and key insights of comparative political research.

Introduction to "Subnational COVID-19 Politics and Policy".

Introduction to "Subnational COVID-19 Politics and Policy".

Political Competition and Right-Wing Terrorism: A County-Level Analysis of the United States

While many previous studies on U.S. right-wing violence center on factors such as racial threat and economic anxiety, we draw from comparative politics research linking electoral dynamics to anti-minority violence. Furthermore, we argue that the causes of right-wing terrorism do not solely rest on political, economic, or social changes individually, but on their interaction. Using a geocoded, U.S. county-level analysis of right-wing terrorist incidents from 1970 to 2016, we find no evidence that poorer or more diverse counties are targets of right-wing terrorism. Rather, right-wing violence is more common in areas where “playing the ethnic card” makes strategic sense for elites looking to shift electoral outcomes: counties that are in electorally competitive areas and that are predominantly white.

Inside Countries: Subnational Research in Comparative Politics. Edited by Agustina Giraudy, Eduardo Moncada, and Richard Snyder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 386p. $99.99 cloth, $34.99 paper.

Inside Countries: Subnational Research in Comparative Politics. Edited by Agustina Giraudy, Eduardo Moncada, and Richard Snyder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 386p. 34.99 paper. - Volume 19 Issue 1

The Arab uprisings and the return of repression

ABSTRACT The Arab uprisings of 2011 led to a reassessment of comparative politics research on authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa. The Arab region made its way from area studies into mainstream comparative politics, and research foci have shifted towards civil-military relations and repression. Ten years later, we observe higher levels of repression across the region, reflecting a diversity of repressive trends. Advocating comprehensive research on this variation, we review recent literature that tackles various dimensions of repression in Arab autocracies. In addition to disaggregating forms and targets of repression, we call for its justifications, agents and transnational dimensions to be considered next to the implications of digital technologies of coercion. We also reflect on how repression affects the possibility of doing research and how we can investigate the proposed dimensions of repression.

Multilevel Research Designs: Case Selection, Levels of Analysis, and Scope Conditions

Subnational research in comparative politics has been growing steadily in the last two decades. However, methodological advances have been rather limited. This article builds upon Snyder’s (Stud Comp Int Dev 36(1):93–110, 2001) subnational comparative method and extends its logic to the comparison of subnational units from different countries. It proposes a novel typology of multilevel research designs that focuses particularly on cross-national small-N analysis (CSNA). This research design offers three different logics of qualitative case selection to achieve a sound trade-off between internal and external validity. This article analyzes the advantages and limitations of the underlying logics of CSNA and illustrates their use with recent empirical research from Latin American countries. It concludes by highlighting its versatility and offers a series of best practices in order to produce more generalizable findings than the majority of single-country subnational comparisons.

From Foreign Text to Local Meaning: The Politics of Religious Exclusion in Transnational Constitutional Borrowing

AbstractConstitutional drafters often look to foreign constitutional models, ideas, and texts for inspiration; many are explicit about their foreign borrowing. However, when implemented domestically, the meaning of borrowed elements often changes. Political scientists and scholars of comparative constitutional law have analyzed the transnational movement of constitutional ideas and norms, but the political processes through which the meaning of foreign provisions might be refashioned remain understudied. Sociolegal scholars have examined the “transplantation” and “translation” of laws and legal institutions, but they rarely scrutinize this process in the context of constitutions. Drawing on an examination of borrowed constitutional elements in four cases (Pakistan, Morocco, Egypt, Israel), this article builds on research in comparative politics, comparative constitutional law, and sociolegal studies to provide a nuanced picture of deliberate efforts to import “inclusive” constitutional provisions regarding religion-state relations while, at the same time, refashioning the meaning of those provisions in ways that “exclude” specific forms of religious, sectarian, doctrinal, or ideological diversity. Building on sociolegal studies regarding the translation of law, we argue that foreign constitutional elements embraced by politically embedded actors are often treated as “empty signifiers” with meanings that are deliberately transformed. Tracing the processes that lead political actors to engage foreign constitutional elements, even if they have no intention of transplanting their prior meaning, we highlight the need for detailed case studies to reveal both the international and the national dynamics that shape and reshape the meaning of constitutions today.

Comparing and connecting territories of illiberal politics and neoliberal governance

ABSTRACTThis afterword to the special issue on ‘Planetary Illiberalism’ examines the ways in which the papers raise and respond to two key questions: namely: What are the connections between neoliberalism and contemporary illiberalism?; and How can the space-specific study of ‘planetary illiberalism’ help discern such connections while avoiding the over-inflation of neoliberalism as a planetary-scale, context-free meta-explanation that ultimately ends up explaining nothing? To answer these questions, it is argued that it is useful to research the context-contingent connections between illiberal politics and neoliberal governance both comparatively and relationally at the same time. Lessons from both ‘varieties of capitalism’ (VoC) research in comparative politics and the literature on variegated neoliberalism can thereby be productively combined.