The forthcoming article “If They Endorse It, I Can’t Trust It: How Outgroup Leader Endorsements Undercut Public Support for Civil War Peace Settlements” by Nicholas Haas and Prabin B. Khadka is summarized by the author(s) below. 

Most of us have been accustomed to seeing photographs of formerly warring leaders smiling and holding up jointly signed peace agreements. Indeed, the world has seen a new peak in the number of conflicts, with 50 or greater every year since 2014. Unfortunately, peace settlements have failed to curb the increase in conflict, and many result in a relapse in violence; since 2015, only one peace agreement has led to conflict termination, which was in  Colombia with the FARC in 2016 (Pettersson et al. 2019). Do leader endorsements of peace agreements have their intended effect, that is, do they increase civilian support? Given the high percentage of negotiated peace settlements that fail to deliver enduring peace, and evidence that public opinion can play a key role in determining settlement success or failure, we believe that answering this question — and more generally, understanding the drivers of civilian attitudes toward peace agreements — is of great import.

To evaluate our question, we took advantage of a brief lull in the ongoing ethnic civil war in South Sudan in 2016 to conduct the first-ever endorsement study of peace policies in an active conflict setting. A large extant literature on leader endorsements in non-conflict settings indicated, somewhat intuitively, that endorsements from ethnic in-group leaders should increase support for policies and that endorsements from ethnic out-group leaders should decrease support for policies. However, as we note in the paper, the application of these studies to a conflict setting was unclear, particularly in light of a large body of evidence showing how conflict can powerfully alter individuals’ emotions and priorities.

Our experimental results provided strong support for the out-group expectation: support for real tentative peace policies dropped precipitously where they were first endorsed by ethnic out-group leaders, and effects appeared to be greatest for those from the communities targeted most violently by that out-group. More surprising, however, was our finding that ethnic in-group leaders’ endorsements did not alter individuals’ support.

How should our results be interpreted? We argue that prolonged conflict and continued failed promises to deliver peace from both sides leads individuals to doubt both in- and out-group leaders, but with differential downstream effects. Conflict leads individuals to distrust out-group leaders and value security over other concerns, and they accordingly perceive an out-group leader’s endorsement as signaling that the leader anticipates a way to exploit the policy and further target one’s ethnic group in the future. In contrast, while conflict leads individuals to doubt the competence of in-group leaders and the credibility of their endorsements, it does not lead them to view in-group leaders’ endorsements as threatening. While an out-group leader’s endorsement signals that a policy is costly, an in-group leader’s endorsement does not convey new information about the policy’s costs or benefits.

Our study indicates that leader endorsements can result in lower levels of civilian support for peace agreements. How can support be increased? Our findings suggest that efforts to build in and communicate safeguards against out-group exploitation, and to increase inter-group trust, may be promising avenues for change. We encourage future work to further investigate how leader endorsements affect peace policy support in conflict settings, and in our own follow-up study, we consider how public opinion in turn affects elite decision-making. 

References 

Pettersson, Therese; Stina Högbladh & Magnus Öberg, 2019. Organized violence, 1989-2018 and peace agreements, Journal of Peace Research 56(4). 

About the Author(s): Nicholas Haas is a PhD Candidate, Department of Politics at New York University and Prabin B. Khadka is a PhD Candidate, Department of Politics at New York University. Their research “If They Endorse It, I Can’t Trust It: How Outgroup Leader Endorsements Undercut Public Support for Civil War Peace Settlements” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science. 

The forthcoming article “Elite Interactions and Voters’ Perceptions of Parties’ Policy Positions” by James Adams, Simon Weschle, and Christopher Wlezien is summarized by the authors below. 

How do citizens learn about parties’ policy positions?  Existing studies show that citizens use factors such as election manifestos or the policies parties implement when they govern.  In addition, research by Fortunato and Stevenson documents that voters use cabinet participation as a heuristic to infer agreement between coalition partners.  We extend this research to assess whether citizens’ inferences reflect more general patterns of inter-party cooperation and conflict beyond formal coalition participation.   

The types of elite interactions we study, which include inter-party bargaining and consultations, party elites’ public statements praising or denouncing rival parties, and politicians’ interactions with non-partisan actors, are the stuff of day-to-day political news coverage.  Yet, to date no study evaluates whether media reports of these events influence parties’ policy images.  We ask the questions: All else equal – including governing coalition arrangements and parties’ policy statements in their election manifestos – do citizens infer that pairs of parties which exhibit more cooperative public relationships share greater degrees of policy agreement?  And, does the answer to this question depend on the time point in the national election cycle?   

We present results suggesting that the answer to each of the above questions is yes.  Empirically, we analyze the degree of cooperation and conflict in public relationships among political parties from 13 Western European democracies between 2001 and 2014.  Our measure is based on latent factor network models of machine-coded news stories that report tens of thousands of interactions between elites from different political parties, along with politicians’ interactions with non-partisan actors. We show that the degree of inter-party cooperation and conflict varies sharply across different pairs of parties, and that, while governing coalition partners on average have more cooperative relationships than other party pairs, there is surprising variation in the tenor of coalition partners’ relations.  We then assess whether these inter-party relationship scores predict citizens’ perceptions of parties’ Left-Right ideological positions, drawn from surveys administered around the times of national parliamentary elections as well as at other points in the election cycle. 

We find that around the times of national elections citizens perceive more Left-Right agreement between pairs of parties that have more cooperative public relationships.  In addition, we also demonstrate that this cooperation effect is not detectible at other points in the election cycle.  Finally, the results show that citizens also apply the coalition heuristic, particularly in non-election years, when the cooperation effect is not evident. 

Our findings reflect positively on the mass public’s political capacities, as they imply that citizens roughly estimate how cooperative the relationships between different pairs of parties are, and use these estimates to infer parties’ positions.  This adds to Fortunato and Stevenson’s identification of a coalition heuristic: while citizens do indeed rely on the simple information shortcut of formal coalition arrangements, they supplement this heuristic with inferences based on more nuanced perceptions of how parties interact with each other – but only near the times of national elections.  

About the Authors: James Adams is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Davis, Simon Weschle is Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science and the Maxwell School of Citizenship at Syracuse University, and Christopher Wlezien is Hogg Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin.   Their research “Elite Interactions and Voters’ Perceptions of Parties’ Policy Positions” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science. 

The forthcoming article “Discursive Exit” by Laura Montanaro is summarized by the author below. 

On January 21st, 2017, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, approximately 470,000 people, mostly women, marched on Washington, and between 3.6 and 4.6 million people participated in sister marches worldwide, on seven continents. The march was widely hailed for its multigenerational and multiracial character. We now know that American participants in the march were mostly white, suburban women (Fisher, Dow and Ray 2017, Putnam and Skocpol 2018), with many women of color reportedly choosing not to participate.  

They chose not to participate, not because they support Trump’s election – Edison Research exit polls showed that among women who voted, 94% of Black women and 68% of Latino women voted for Clinton, while roughly 53% of white women voted for Trump (Malone 2016) – but to resist the claims of organizers and participants calling for unity and solidarity when women of color regularly show up to defend women’s rights and issues and yet do not receive reciprocal respect or attention.  

Black women, transgender women, and disabled women, among others, used what I call ‘discursive exit’: they exited an unwelcome political claim – a claim to speak for and about women that emphasised unity and solidarity while insensitive to intersectional marginalisation – marking an important refusal to belong to or remain within a group as defined by the power-wielders. They also provided reasons and explanations and called for the organizers of and participants in the Women’s March to be accountable for the power they exercised in defining the terms of the group. 

Building on Hirschman’s classic Exit, Voice, Loyalty (EVL), ‘discursive exit’ captures a distinct idea: we must be able to target effective monopolies in the domain of supposedly competitive voluntary associations. In a democracy, these kinds of monopolies will occur episodically because of organisation, issue framing and focus, and momentum. For a time, The Women’s March had a strategic or episodic monopoly on speaking for others. It claimed to speak for all women and, because of its visibility, had an effective, if temporary, monopoly on this claim. Because the mechanism of responsiveness is joining/exiting the organisation, exit is an option. But this comes at the cost of not belonging to a high-impact movement when there are no immediate or as visible alternatives. And organisations that have an effective monopoly dampen the join/exit mode of responsiveness anyway. We might voice ‘from within’ but voluntary (movement) organisation is low on internal discourse, simply because the mechanism of responsiveness is joining/exiting the organisation, and leaves participants feeling morally complicit in an unwelcome exercise of power.  

Discursive exit nudges this kind of monopoly toward better and more responsive claim-making and representation than is available in the ‘join/exit’ model of responsiveness typical of voluntary organisations.  

About the Author: Laura Montanaro is Lecturer, Department of Government, University of Essex, United Kingdom. Her research “Discursive Exit” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “A Choice-Based Measure of Issues Importance in the Electorate” by Chris Hanretty, Benjamin E. Lauderdale and Nick Vivyan is summarized by the authors below.

A Choice‐Based Measure of Issue Importance in the Electorate

**Some issues are more important to voters than others.** 

This is a simple idea, but measuring “issue importance” is hard. 

If you ask people what issue is most important to them, they often mention issues that they’ve read or heard lots about, not necessarily issues that are personally important to them.  These self-reports aren’t that helpful: knowing what issue a respondent *says* is most important to them often [doesn’t help us make much sense of how they *vote*](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9494-0). 

Our article takes a different approach. Instead of asking survey respondents to pick important issues, we ask respondents which positions they prefer themselves and then ask them to pick between sets of issue positions, presented as fictional candidate platforms. We fielded our survey in the UK, but nothing about our method is specific to the UK except the issues and positions we use. You can see an example of the issue positions presented to respondents in Figure 1; Figure 2 shows the choice between fictional candidates. Respondents get to pick one of the two bundles, or to say that they’re not sure. 

These choices don’t show which issues were most important for specific individuals, but they do show which issues tend to influence voting most strongly overall.  If respondents tend to pick a bundle which gives them their most-preferred policy on issue X, no matter what positions the hypothetical candidates take on issues Y and Z, then we learn that issue X is more important to them than Y and Z.  The core intuition is that what we actually mean by an issue being more “important” is that changing a candidate’s positions on that issue has a greater tendency to make people choose different candidates than they otherwise would have. 

A final element of our importance measure is that, for an issue to be politically important, respondents have to feel strongly about the range of alternatives that other respondents frequently hold. Healthcare in the UK is a good example of the need to consider the distribution of opinion.  One possible position that we presented on this issue is to privatize the National Health Service and let companies charge what they want for medical care. This position has a *really strong* impact on people’s choices: very few people say they would vote for candidates who want to privatize the NHS. But this position also isn’t one which many people support. We therefore weight how much people dislike different political positions by the frequency with which those positions are held in the population. For an issue to be important as we understand it, people need to really dislike positions that many other people say they support. 

One key finding is that while obvious high profile issues like the future relationship of the UK with the EU are important by our measure, there are also issues ignored by current political contestation where the public disagrees intensely.  The death penalty has not been used in the UK since the 1960s and is rarely a subject to political debate, but if parties were to take up differing positions on this issue, our experiment suggests that it would become very contentious.  There are substantial factions among UK citizens on opposing sides of the issue and they seem to put a lot of weight on the issue in candidate comparisons.  That lack of current contestation on this issue might be good or bad — but the latent conflict is something that our method can identify which previous methods cannot.  ​ 

About the Authors: Chris Hanretty is Professor, Royal Holloway, University of London, School of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy, Benjamin E. Lauderdale is Professor, University College London, Department of Political Science and Nick Vivyanis is Professor, Durham University, School of Government and International Affairs. Their research “A Choice-Based Measure of Issues Importance in the Electorate” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “When Do Displaced Persons Return? Postwar Migration among Christians in Mount Lebanon” by Kara Ross Camarena and Nils Hägerdal is summarized  by the authors below.

After wars end, there is great hope that people displaced by violence will be able to return to their homes and resume their lives. Provisions for return are often written into peace treaties. Governments set up departments devoted to helping returnees. Local and international organizations invest in helping returnees to rebuild their lives. Despite these efforts in many cases, few displaced persons return to their original homes. We study postwar migration among Lebanese Christians displaced during the 1980s, where only about 20% of the displaced returned to live in their villages of origin. Using variation in villages’ abilities to take advantage of the world olive oil boom and price shocks, we show that economic prospects in displaced persons’ original villages drive return. Further, even when there is little threat of violence, displaced Christians avoid returning to places where they would live among non-Christians

We challenge a definition of return that requires permanent residence. Many displaced Christians in Lebanon regularly visit their original homes but live and work in urban areas with more vibrant economies. These once displaced persons do not live in their original homes. They do maintain meaningful connections to their place of origin, and their displacement has a resolution. They become like labor migrants who live in a place with economic opportunity, but return home regularly for personal, familial, and social reasons.

Even taking into account that some people return home as visitors, there is variation in the return among Christians displaced from Mt. Lebanon. In some villages, nearly all the displaced returned permanently. In other villages they returned, but mostly as visitors. Other villages had little return of any kind. Economic opportunity is a key explanation for this variation. Using a natural experiment, we show that there is more permanent return to villages with growing economic opportunities. Nevertheless, there is a negative relationship between return and the original ethnic composition of a village; the more mixed the village, the less displaced persons return or visit.

One key implication of our study is that having displaced persons return as permanent residents need not be a postwar policy goal. When the displaced left areas of economic decline for vibrant urban locations, economic reconstruction may be more effective when targeted at displaced persons’ new surroundings. A similar logic pertains to transitional justice efforts. Displaced persons, who were once dispossessed by wartime violence but now return as regular visitors, are no longer deprived of enjoying their original homes. There is no obvious reason why policymakers should turn regular visitors—or persons who are happily settled and have no desire to return—into permanent residents. Transitional justice programs should not limit their evaluations to permanent resident return but also examine whether regular visitors indicate success in mending intergroup relations.

About the Authors: Kara Ross Camarena is Postdoctoral Researcher, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago and Nils Hägerdal is Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Strategic Studies, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Their research “When Do Displaced Persons Return? Postwar Migration among Christians in Mount Lebanon” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science. 

The forthcoming article “Equity and Political Economy in Thomas Hobbes” (https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12507) by Lee Ward is summarized by the author below.

What can a seventeenth-century English political philosopher possibly teach us today about the challenges confronting the contemporary liberal democratic state in the age of Brexit and Trump? Actually, quite a lot, especially if that thinker is Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes has long been recognized as one of the founding figures of the modern idea of the state. Indeed, for decades Hobbes has been cited as one of the great authorities that established a distinctive philosophical anthropology of the acquisitive, bourgeois individual, the protection of whose property rights provides the legitimate end of the night watchman, minimalist classical liberal state.  This is to say, Hobbes is often considered to be one of the theoretical inspirations for a definition of liberalism that is inseparable from free market economics. 

In this study, I argue that Hobbes’ theory of the state and economics has been too often misunderstood.  Hobbes in fact reminds us that classical liberalism was not only about individual rights, especially property rights.  It was also built upon a normative idea of equality, or what Hobbes terms “equity,” which means that Hobbes’ conception of the state cannot be reduced to an instrumental device simply devoted to protecting property rights and the sanctity of contract.  In this study, I demonstrate that Hobbes’ account of political economy presupposed considerable scope for government action with respect to regulation of markets and redistribution of wealth; government action in service of the natural law principles of equity and fairness. 

Hopefully by reexamining a figure as familiar as Hobbes with fresh eyes, this study will encourage us to reconsider what we think we already know about the classical liberal tradition, a version of which continues to influence contemporary liberal theory and practice. If Hobbes is not the apostle of acquisitive capitalism that we have long been told he is, then perhaps the classical liberal political tradition is more diverse than we have long assumed it to be.  With this possibility for a new perspective about the origins of the liberal idea of the state, we may be able to better understand and critique contemporary liberal democratic states as they face deep challenges of legitimacy in the age of austerity and populism.  Arguably Hobbes has never been more relevant than today. 

About the Author: Lee Ward is Professor, Department of Political Science, Baylor University. Their research “Equity and Political Economy in Thomas Hobbes” (https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12507) is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The forthcoming article “A Public Ethics of Care for Policy Implementation” (https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12487) by Daniel Engster is summarized by the author below.

Dealing with government bureaucrats can be downright unpleasant at times. We may feel unheard, unseen, disrespected, and subject to seemingly arbitrary rules. How do these experiences mesh with the ideals of liberal-democratic government – particularly the notion that government should be attentive and responsive to the people and not govern in autocratic ways? 

In “A Public Ethics of Care for Policy Implementation,” I suggest it is not. Liberal democracies have generally assumed that a hierarchical, rule-bound, and impartial “Weberian” bureaucratic ethics is best suited for carrying out policies through the public bureaucracy. The idea is that bureaucrats will support liberal-democratic ideals by faithfully and mechanically enforcing the laws and policies enacted by the people’s democratically-elected representatives.  

The problem with this perspective is that bureaucrats invariably do have some discretion in applying laws and policies to individuals. This point, emphasized by Michael Lipsky in Street-Level Bureaucracy, has become a staple of research on policy implementation. Street-level bureaucrats, including social workers, child protection workers, police officers, municipal judges, and others all must decide which laws and policies apply to which particular individuals and cases, when, and how. Discretion is inherent in their jobs.  

Rule-bound and impartial bureaucratic ethics encourage administrators to disclaim this discretion for a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach to policy implementation. This is one of reasons dealing with government bureaucrats can be so frustrating. They claim they are “just following the rules” but we intuitively understand that they are actually following one interpretation of the rules and applying it without regard to our unique circumstances.  

If the discretion inherent in policy implementation is to be made consistent with liberal-democratic principles, I argue it must be subjected to democratic sanctioning. I propose in my article a public ethics of care as an alternative to the existing rule-bound, impartial bureaucratic ethics for achieving this democratic sanctioning and manifesting liberal principles of limited and responsive government in the public bureaucracy. A public ethics of care provides a model for the attentive and responsive use of discretion within the law by encouraging bureaucrats to relate to individuals as persons and work with them in appropriate ways to apply laws and policies to their circumstances. It can be achieved by emphasizing this approach within the administrative culture and changing promotion and review guidelines to reflect caring values. 

Integrating a public ethics of care into public administrations is important because, as Lipsky argued, individuals experience state power primarily through their encounters with street-level bureaucrats. If street-level bureaucrats exercise their powers in inattentive, unresponsive, and domineering ways, this is how many citizens will experience the liberal-democratic state.

About the Author: Daniel Engster is Professor, Hobby School of Public Affairs, The University of Houston. His research “A Public Ethics of Care for Policy Implementation” (https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12487) is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.