Unresponsive and Unpersuaded: The Unintended Consequences of a Voter Persuasion Effort

To date, field experiments on campaign tactics have focused overwhelmingly on mobilization and voter turnout, with far more limited attention to persuasion and vote choice. In this paper, we analyze a field experiment with 56,000 Wisconsin voters designed to measure the persuasive effects of canvassing, phone calls, and mailings during the 2008 presidential election. Focusing on the canvassing treatment, we find that persuasive appeals had two unintended consequences. First, they reduced responsiveness to a follow-up survey among infrequent voters, a substantively meaningful behavioral response that has the potential to induce bias in estimates of persuasion effects as well. Second, the persuasive appeals possibly reduced candidate support and almost certainly did not increase it. This counterintuitive finding is reinforced by multiple statistical methods and suggests that contact by a political campaign may engender a backlash.     

Collective Resistance under Authoritarianism: Elite–Mass Strategies in an Experimental Game

We create a collective resistance game in which elites control the distribution of resources if the masses are compliant. However, if the masses unanimously protest elite allocations, they can capture a greater share of resources for themselves. We study how Chinese villagers, randomly assigned to the role of elites and masses, play this game in repeated interactions under varying information conditions. We find significant variation in the extent to which participants gave weight in their decisions to (1) the amount of the elite allocation and (2) their beliefs about the likely choices of fellow group members. Many individuals made their decisions based primarily on the size of the elite allocation, choosing to protest if the elite offer fell below some threshold level. Only a small proportion of the respondents were attuned consistently to the behavioral intentions of fellow group members in deciding whether to protest the elite allocation. This heterogeneity of preferences among participants has significant implications for their prospects of achieving and sustaining collective action. Knowledge of the amount of resources controlled by elites at the start of the game affected mass calculations of the fairness of distributions and increased the frequency of mass protests. However, the elites exploited the decision rule of many mass members by buying off those individuals with the lowest thresholds, thus preempting or dissolving collective action. This research sheds light on elite–mass interactions under authoritarianism, and in particular on contentious politics in contemporary China.     

China’s Coherence in International Economic Governance

This article analyzes China’s coherence in international economic governance. When and how is China challenging the rules and norms of the prevailing international economic order? Has China adopted the current rules and norms across the board, or is it proceeding in an ad hoc or piecemeal manner? How can its (in) coherence be explained? To address these questions, I compare China’s profile vis-à-vis three dimensions of the global economic order: trade, investment, and development aid. I argue that in international trade and investment, China has neither sought nor brought about significant change. China is however, offering an alternative to the Western norms that until now have dominated the global development aid regime. China’s establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is notable in this regard, though it is still soon to determine if the Chinese-led development bank will break with existing norms. The article then considers possible theoretical explanations for the variation in China’s behavior across the three areas.     

Engendering Transitional Justice: a Transformative Approach to Building Peace and Attaining Human Rights for Women

In this article, we examine the continuity of harms and traumas experienced by women before, during and after war and other mass violence. We focus on women because of the particular challenges they face in accessing justice due to patriarchal structures and ongoing discrimination in the political, economic and social, as well as legal spheres, and because of the gendered nature of the crimes and harms they experience. We use the four key pillars of transitional justice identified by the United Nations as a framework to analyse how these harms are addressed in the context of criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations and institutional reform. We conclude that a gender-transformative approach to transitional justice that focuses on transforming psychosocial, socioeconomic and political power relations in society is needed in order to attain human rights for women and build a sustainable peace.