Workshop on Endogenous Institutions
and Political Conflict
An annual workshop since 2006

The UC Berkeley Positive Political Theory group hosts a two-day workshop on Endogenous Institutions and Political Conflict every spring on the Berkeley campus. This workshop brings together a group of scholars who share related interests on institutions. Papers are presented on a wide variety of topics, including civil wars, authority, war and collective action, polarization, inefficient states and democracy. Papers from past workshops can be downloaded below.

Skip to papers from 2008, 2007, 2006.

2008 Papers

CIG Working Paper No. 69
Andrea Vindigni, Daron Acemoglu and Davide Ticchi
A Theory of Military Dictatorships

CIG Working Paper No. 70
Gerard Padro i Miquel and Sylvain Chassang
Conflict and Deterrence under Strategic Risk

CIG Working Paper No. 71
Carles Boix and Milan Svolik
The Foundations of Limited Authoritarian Government: Institutions and Power-sharing in Dictatorships

CIG Working Paper No. 72
Timothy Besley and Masayuki Kudamatsu
Making Autocracy Work

CIG Working Paper No. 73
Daron Acemoglu, Georgy Egorov and Konstantin Sonin
Dynamics and Stability of Constitutions, Coalitions,
and Clubs

CIG Working Paper No. 74
Luz Marina Arias
A Theory of the Origins of Coercive Enforcement by the
State: Insights from Colonial Mexico

A Theory of Military Dictatorships (374kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 69
Andrea Vindigni, Princeton University
Daron Acemoglu, MIT and CIFAR
Davide Ticchi, University of Urbino
April 3, 2008

We investigate how nondemocratic regimes use the military and how this can lead to the emergence of military dictatorships. Nondemocratic regimes need the use of force in order to remain in power, but this creates a political moral hazard problem; a strong military may not simply work as an agent of the elite but may turn against them in order to create a regime more in line with their own objectives. The political moral hazard problem increases the cost of using repression in nondemocratic regimes and in particular, necessitates high wages and policy concessions to the military. When these concessions are not sufficient, the military can take action against a nondemocratic regime in order to create its own dictatorship. A more important consequence of the presence of a strong military is that once transition to
democracy takes place, the military poses a coup threat against the nascent democratic regime until it is reformed. The anticipation that the military will be reformed in the future acts as an additional motivation for the military to undertake coups against democratic governments. We show that greater inequality makes the use of the military in nondemocratic regimes more
likely and also makes it more di¢ cult for democracies to prevent military coups. In addition, greater inequality also makes it more likely that nondemocratic regimes are unable to solve the political moral hazard problem and thus creates another channel for the emergence of
military dictatorships. We also show that greater natural resource rents make military coups against democracies more likely, but have ambiguous effects on the political equilibrium in nondemocracies (because with abundant natural resources, repression becomes more valuable to the elite, but also more expensive to maintain because of the more severe political moral
hazard problem that natural resources induce). Finally, we discuss how the national defense role of the military interacts with its involvement in domestic politics.

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Conflict and Deterrence under Strategic Risk (265 kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 70
Gerard Padro i Miquel, London School of Economics and NBER
Sylvain Chassang, Princeton University
April 9, 2008

We examine the mechanics of deterrence and intervention when fear is a motive for conflict. We contrast results obtained in a complete information setting, where coordination is easy, to those obtained in a setting with strategic risk, where players have different assessments of their environment. These two strategic settings allow us to define and distinguish predatory and preemptive incentives as determinants of conflict. We show that while weapons have an unambiguous deterrent effect under complete
information, this does not hold anymore under strategic risk. Rather, we find that increases in weapon stocks can have a non-monotonic effect on the sustainability of peace. We also show that under strategic risk, inequality in military strength can actually facilitate peace and that anticipated peace-keeping interventions may improve incentives for peaceful behavior.

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The Foundations of Limited Authoritarian Government: Institutions and Power-sharing in Dictatorships (312kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 71
Carles Boix, Princeton University
Milan Svolik, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
April 25, 2008

Why do some dictatorships establish institutions typically associated with democracy, such as legislatures or political parties? We propose a new theoretical model of authoritarian power-sharing and institutions in dictatorships. We argue that political institutions in dictatorships enhance the stability of power-sharing, and therefore the survival of these regimes. However, authoritarian power-sharing through institutions is feasible only when it is backed by the crude but credible threat of a rebellion by the ruler's allies. Whereas the allies' political opportunities -- rather than a contingent
coordination of beliefs among them -- determine the credibility of their rebellion, institutions resolve the commitment and monitoring problems caused by the secrecy in authoritarian governance. Our theory generates new predictions about the empirical relationship between political institutions, economic development, and leader tenure.

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Making Autocracy Work (698kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 72
Timothy Besley, London School of Economics and CIFAR
Masayuki Kudamatsu, Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES),
Stockholm University
April 25, 2008

One of the key goals of political economy is to understand how institutional arrangements shape policy outcomes. This paper studies a comparatively neglected aspect of this -- the forces that shape heterogeneous performance of autocracies. The paper develops a simple theoretical model of accountability in the absence of regularized elections. Leadership turnover is managed by a selectorate -- a group of individuals on whom the leader depends to hold onto power. Good policy is institutionalized when the selectorate removes poorly performing leaders from office. This requires that the selectorate’s hold on power is not too dependent on a specific leader being in office. The paper looks empirically at spells of autocracy to establish cases where it has been successful according to various objective criteria. We use these case studies to identify the selectorate in specific instances of
successful autocracy. We also show that, consistent with the theory, leadership turnover in successful autocracies is higher than in unsuccessful autocracies. Finally, we show by exploiting leadership deaths from natural causes, that successful autocracies appear to have found ways for selectorates to nominate successors without losing power -- a feature which is also consistent with the theoretical approach.

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Dynamics and Stability of Constitutions, Coalitions, and Clubs (335kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 73
Daron Acemoglu, MIT
Georgy Egorov, Harvard University
Konstantin Sonin, The New Economic School
April 25, 2008

A central feature of collective decision-making in many social groups, such as political coalitions, international unions, or private clubs, is that the rules that govern the procedures for future decision-making and the inclusion and exclusion of members are made by the current members and under the
current regulations. This feature implies that dynamic collective decisions must recognize the implications of current decisions on future choices. For example, current constitutional change must take into account how the new constitution may pave the way for further changes in laws and regulations. We develop a general framework for the analysis of this class of problems. We provide both an axiomatic and a non-cooperative characterization of dynamically stable states and show that, under reasonable assumptions,
these exist and are unique. We then apply our framework to a variety of problems in political economy, in coalition formation, and in the analysis of the dynamics of clubs. Major insights that emerge from this framework are: (1) A particular social arrangement is made stable by the instability of alternative arrangements that are preferred by su¢ ciently many members of the society. For example, stability of a constitution does not require absence of powerful groups opposing it, but the absence of an alternative constitution favored by powerful groups. (2) Efficiency-enhancing changes are often resisted because of further social changes that they will engender. Consequently, Pareto inefficient social arrangements often emerge as stable outcomes.

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A Theory of the Origins of Coercive Enforcement by the State: Insights from Colonial Mexico (241kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 74
Luz Marina Arias, Stanford University
April 25, 2008

This paper contributes to our understanding of the factors that lead to the creation of a fiscal administration backed by centralized coercion through a historical and game theoretical analysis of colonial Mexico. In the model, the fiscal regime is endogenous: the ruler can choose to delegate the collection of revenue or to create a state administration. The essential trade-off is that the gains in efficiency under delegation come at a cost; collective objectives cannot be harmonized under delegation. The benefits others receive from someone's contribution cannot be internalized under delegation. The
presence of an external shock that creates the need to provide a public good -- in my analysis a standing army due to a threat of conflict -- can give rise to a coercive state administration which serves as a commitment device to overcome free riding. The analysis suggests that the enforcement mechanism used to collect revenue is endogenous to the excludable nature of the goods provided by the state.

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2007 Papers

CIG Working Paper No. 53
James D. Fearon, Civil War Since 1945: Some facts and a theory

CIG Working Paper No. 54
Daron Acemoglu, Davide Ticchi and Andrea Vindigni, Emergence and Persistence of Inefficient States

CIG Working Paper No. 55
Pedro Dal Bo, Andrew Foster and Louis Putterman, Institutions and Behavior: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Democracy

CIG Working Paper No. 56
John Bellows and Edward Miguel, War and Local Collective Action in Sierra Leone

CIG Working Paper No. 57
Catherine Hafer, Contests over Political Authority

Political Polarization, (200kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 52
Avinash K. Dixit
April 16, 2007

Failures of government policies often provoke opposite reactions from citizens; some call for a reversal of the policy while others favor its continuation in stronger form. We offer an explanation of such polarization, based on a natural bimodality of preferences in political and economic contexts, and consistent with Bayesian rationality.

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The most common form of civil war in the post-World War II period has been a stalemated guerrilla war confined to a rural periphery of a low-income, post-colonial state. Standard contest models of conflict do not capture important and distinctive features of insurgency, and in particular the fact that guerrilla survival depends on their controlling information about who and where they are. I present a game model in which rebel control of territory depends on how many remain uncaptured by government forces. Capture
becomes more likely as the rebel movement expands, due to network connections among the rebels. The model explains how and why insurgencies can remain stalemated at low levels of conflict. It also shows that standard explanations for the strong cross-national association between poverty and civil war risk – for example, that poverty makes joining a rebel band a more attractive option or that risk aversion makes the rich more fearful of conflict – are incoherent or strongly incomplete as typically stated. I argue that more plausible explanations for the empirical regularity pose an indirect link, via the association of high income with (a) natural and social terrains inimical to guerrilla hiding, (b) possibly state military capability to conduct more efficient counterinsurgency, and (c) inability to appropriate as large a share of income through house-to-house visits by guerrillas, due in part to the mobility of human capital.

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Emergence and Persistence of Inefficient States (590kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 54
Daron Acemoglu, MIT
Davide Ticchi, University of Urbino
Andrea Vindigni, Princeton University
April 16, 2007

Inefficiencies in the bureaucratic organization of the state are often viewed as important factors in retarding economic development. Why certain societies choose or end up with such inefficient organizations has received very little attention, however. In this paper, we present a simple theory of the emergence and persistence of inefficient states based on patronage politics. The society consists of rich and poor individuals. The rich are initially in power, but expect to transition to democracy, which will choose redistributive policies. Taxation requires the employment of bureaucrats. We show that, under certain circumstances, by choosing an inefficient state structure, the rich may be able to use patronage and capture democratic
politics. This enables them to reduce the amount of redistribution and public good provision in democracy. Moreover, the inefficient state creates its own constituency and tends to persist over time. Intuitively, an inefficient state structure creates more rents for bureaucrats than would an efficient state structure. When the poor come to power in democracy, they will reform
the structure of the state to make it more efficient so that higher taxes can be collected at lower cost and with lower rents for bureaucrats. Anticipating this, when the society starts out with an inefficient organization of the state, bureaucrats support the rich, who set lower taxes but also provide rents to bureaucrats. We show that in order to generate enough political support,
the coalition of the rich and the bureaucrats may not only choose an inefficient organization of the state, but they may expand the size of bureaucracy “excessively” so as to gain additional votes. The model shows that an equilibrium with an inefficient state is more likely to arise when there is greater inequality between the rich and the poor, when bureaucratic rents take intermediate values and when individuals are sufficiently forward-looking.

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Institutions and Behavior: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Democracy (191kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 55
Pedro Dal Bo, Brown University
Andrew Foster, Brown University
Louis Putterman, Brown University
April 17, 2007

We present results from a novel experiment on the effect of a policy designed to encourage cooperation in a prisoner’s dilemma game. We find
that the effect of this policy on the level of cooperation is greater when it
was chosen democratically by the subjects than when it was exogenously
imposed. This difference remains after controlling for selection (those that
choose the policy may be more likely to be affected by it). We conclude that
the treatment effect of policies may depend on whether they are endogenous
or exogenous to the society on which they are imposed. Therefore,
democratic institutions may have an effect on behavior in addition to the
effect in terms of policy choice. More generally, our findings have implications for empirical studies of treatment effects in other contexts: the
effect of a treatment may depend on whether it is endogenous or exogenous.

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War and Local Collective Action in Sierra Leone (799kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 56
John Bellows, UC Berkeley
Edward Miguel, UC Berkeley
April 17, 2007

We estimate the effects of the brutal 1991-2002 Sierra Leone civil war using unique nationally representative household data on conflict experiences, postwar economic outcomes, and local politics and collective action. Individuals whose households personally experienced more intense war violence are robustly more likely to attend community meetings, more likely to vote, more likely to contribute to local public goods, and are more aware of local politics. Several tests indicate selection into victimization is not driving the results. The relationship between conflict intensity and postwar outcomes is weaker at more aggregate levels, suggesting that the war’s primary impact was on individual preferences rather than on institutions or local social norms. More speculatively, the findings could help partially explain the rapid postwar economic and political recovery observed in Sierra Leone and after several other recent African civil wars.

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Contests over Political Authority (329kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 57
Catherine Hafer, New York University
April 22, 2007

This paper analyzes a model of endogenous political authority in which authority may be established by force through a standoff. Two players have a mix of common and contrary interests; the resolution of the dispute is required to be self-sustaining, i.e. there is no external enforcement of agreements; and the players are uncertain about each other’s resolve, i.e., about the relative strength of their interests in one outcome over another. An equilibrium solution of the model provides insights into the duration of the contest over authority, its ultimate outcome, and the conditions under which a peaceful resolution is possible. I show that neither cheap talk nor impartial mediation promote peaceful resolutions or enhance efficiency. Costly signaling reduces the incidence of conflict but may consume more resources than the conflict it obviates.

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2006 Papers

CIG Working Paper No. 11
Davide Ticchi and Andrea Vindigni, War and Endogenous Democracy

War and Endogenous Democracy (274kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 11
Davide Ticchi, University of Urbino
Andrea Vindigni, Princeton University
March 11, 2006
Updated to Dec. 2007 version on March 11, 2008

Many episodes of extension of franchise in the 19th and especially in the 20th century occurred during or in the aftermath of major wars. Motivated by this fact, we offer a theory of political transitions which focuses on the impact of international con‡icts on domestic political institutions. We argue that mass-armies, which appeared in Europe after the French Revolution, are an e¤ecutive military organization only if the conscripted citizens are willing to put effort in fighting wars, which in turn depends on the economic incentives that are provided to them. The need to provide such incentives, implies that an oligarchy adopting a mass-army may voluntarily decide to promise some amount of income redistribution to its citizens, conditionally on satisfactory performance as soldiers. When the elite cannot credibly commit to provide an incentive-compatible redistribution, they may cope with the moral hazard problem of the citizens-soldiers only by relinquishing political power to them through the extension of franchise. This is because democracy always implements a highly redistributive fiscal policy, which makes fighting hard incentive-compatible for the citizens-soldiers. We show that a transition to democracy is more likely to occur when the external threat faced by an incumbent oligarchy is in some sense intermediate. A very high external threat allows the elite to make credible commitments of future income redistribution in favor of the citizens, while a limited external threat makes optimal for the elite not making any (economic or political) concession
to the masses. Some historical evidence consistent with our theory is also provided.

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An Empirical Analysis of Civil Conflict in Nepal (173kb. pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 12 (Updated April 18, 2006)
Quy-Toan Do, World Bank
Lakshmi, Iyer, Harvard University
March 11, 2006

We conduct an econometric analysis of the economic and social factors which contributed to the spread of civil conflict in Nepal. We find that the intensity of violence is significantly higher in places with greater poverty and lower levels of economic development. After controlling for poverty, social diversity measures are not significant in explaining the spread of the conflict. We find some evidence that the dominance of specifric castes is associated with a greater conflict intensity

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Explaining Conflict in Low-Income Countries: Incomplete Contracting in the Shadow of the Future (138 kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 13
Michael McBride, UC Irvine
Stergios Skaperdas, UC Irvine
March 11, 2006 (Updated April 18, 2006)

We examine two factors that help explain the prevalence of conflict in low-income countries: that adversaries cannot enforce long-term contracts in arms, and that open conflict alters the future strategic positions of the adversaries differently than does peace. Using an infinite horizon model, we show the conditions under which adversaries will not be able to sustain short-term contracts even though doing so is Pareto superior to open conflict. Conflict arises because adversaries attempt to gain future strategic supremacy that only victory in conflict brings. Lower incomes or wages, as well as higher discount factors and the less destructive conflict is, the higher is the likelihood of war.

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Self-Enforcing Democracy (205 kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 14
James Fearon, Stanford University
March 11, 2006

If democracy is to have any of the good effects said to justify it, it must be self-enforcing. Those who control the government must want to hold regular, competitive elections for the highest offices, and all parties must be willing to comply with the results. I consider a model in which citizens can always protest or rebel against the current ruler, but can unseat the ruler only if enough people rebel. When individuals privately observe a signal of the government's performance (e.g. their own welfare), they face a difficult problem of how to coordinate to pose a credible threat of rebellion necessary to keep the ruler from stealing. Further, if the signals are noisy, inefficient rebellions must occur in equilibrium to keep the ruler honest. Allowing for the possibility of elections makes for equilibria that eliminate both problems. The convention of holding elections at particular times provides a public signal for coordinating rebellion in the event that elections are suspended of blatantly rigged. The electoral results themselves aggregate private information about the ruler's performance, providing the ruler an incentive to stick to the terms. Int he case of noisy signals of government performance, the electoral results act as a cheap talk signal that allows the public to commit to rebel if a losing ruler does not step down, avoiding the need for costly rebellions. These arguments pose an explanation for self-enforcing democracy, whereas the several models in the literature do not because they do not explain why anyone would want to use elections to allocate power.

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Federalism and Incentives for Success in Democracy
(Note: Paper is available on author's web site)
CIG Working Paper No. 15
Roger Myerson, University of Chicago
March 24, 2006

Success and failure of democracy are interpreted as different equilibria of a dynamic political game with costs of changing leadership and with incomplete information about politicians' virtue. Unitary democracy can be frustrated when voters do not replace corrupt leaders, because any new leader would probably also govern corruptly. But federal democracy cannot be consistently frustrated at both national and provincial levels, because provincial leaders who govern responsibly could build reputations to become contenders for higher national office. Similarly, democracy cannot be consistently frustrated in a democratization process that begins with decentralized provincial democracy and only later introduces nationally elected leadership.

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A Spatial Analysis of Voting in the Korean National Assembly
CIG Working Paper No. 16
Hae-Won Jun, Yonsei University
Simon Hix, London School of Economics
March 28, 2006

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Does the Electoral Connection Link the Branches?: Legislative Responsiveness to Executive Elections
CIG Working Paper No. 17
Thad Kousser, UC San Diego
Jeffrey Lewis, UCLA
Seth Masket, University of Denver
March 28, 2006

Do legislators and potential legislative candidates respond to the signals that executive election results send out about constituent preferences? This paper takes advantage of the natural experiment provided by California's 2003 recall election -- held at the midpoint of the state's legislative session -- to test theories about the strategic entry of candidates and the ideological mobility of legislators. First, we show that a surge in support for one party in an executive election can help that party recruit more experienced legislative candidates than usual, while qualified leaders in the other party are discouraged from running in districts where the surge is particularly strong. Second, we show that legislators in the weakening party, particularly those in the most competitive districts, will moderate their behavior after the executive election results signal their electoral vulnerability.

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Agenda Control in the German Bundestag, 1980-2002
CIG Working Paper No. 18
William Chandler, UC San Diego
Gary W. Cox, UC San Diego
Mathew D. McCubbins, UC San Diego
March 28, 2006

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Selection Effects in Roll Call Votes
CIG Working Paper No. 19
Simon Hug, CIS, IPZ, Universitat Zurich
April 3, 2006

An increasing number of studies comparing legislatures relies on analyses of roll call votes. These analyses are used to infer characteristics of the way in which the legislature works and how their members vote. This inference is, however, problematic, if not all votes in parliament are recorded or the recorded votes are systematically distinct from the rest of the votes. Neglecting the way in which roll call votes are triggered or decided may result in selection bias. In this paper I discuss these problems of selection bias regarding various rules employed in legislatures which may lead to roll call votes. I then present evidence for these selection biases from a unique source of electronically recorded votes, namely all votes decided on between 1995 and 2003 in the Swiss lower house. A careful analysis illustrates to what extent commonly used figures on party discipline are biased because of the selective nature of roll call votes.

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Tough Choices: Determinants of Senator's Trade Votes
CIG Working Paper No. 20
John H. Aldrich, Duke University
Adam Brinegar, Duke University
Claire V. Kramer, Franklin & Marshall College
Jennifer L. Merolla, Claremont Graduate University
April 3, 2006 (Updated April 11, 2006)

Although trade liberalization has progressed steadily during the postwar period, Congressional trade votes are consistently controversial and contentious matters. Some scholars have explained the endurance of trade barriers by arguing that protectionist interests have organizational advantages (Schattschneider 1935; Destler 1986; Cassing, McKeown and Ochs 1986). More recently, however, Bailey (2003) has claimed that diffuse interests, particularly skilled labor, exert and important and consistent influence on congressional trade voting by virtue of anticipated reaction (Kingdon 1973; Denzau and Munger 1986; Arnold 1990; Verdier 1994). The logic is that representatives serve diffuse groups of voters because failing to do so will lead rival politicians, interest groups, the media and the president to activate interests that benefit from free trade.

These competing claims speak to broader debates about the extent to which constituent interests and preferences motivate legislators' votes. There are, however, two limitations of extant work on Congressional trade votes. First, in assessing the relative influence of constituency, almost all of the studies employ aggregate measures of constituency interest, rather than actual opinion in the member's state or district. Second, previous work generally only specifies free-trade versus protectionist interests and does not consider whether representatives' votes reflect the mean interests of the whole state or of the number's partisans. In this paper, we test the linkages between constituency opinion and key trade votes in the Senate from 1988 to 1994 using data from the ANES Senate Election Study. Employing micro-level evidence, we find support for the impact of constituent policy preferences on certain Senate trade votes.

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Dimensionality in Debating and Voting: The Case of the Partial-Birth Abortion Act of 2003
CIG Working Paper No. 21
Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, London School of Economics
April 7, 2006

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Interval Properties of Ideal Point Estimators
CIG Working Paper No. 22
Royce Carroll, UC San Diego
Keith T. Poole, UC San Diego
April 10, 2006 (Updated April 14, 2006)

The paper is a preliminary exploration of the problems posed by low levels of voting error in the recovery of interval level parameter estimates in spatial (geometric) models of parliamentary voting. Our results, though limited, show strong support for the Quinn Conjecture, namely, if the voting space is one dimensional and the noise process is symmetric, then as the number of roll calls goes to infinity the true rank ordering of the legislators will be recovered.

We also discuss the "sag" problem -- errorless voting by a legislator at the end of the dimension -- and how it relates to estimating ideal point configurations for the United States Supreme Court.

The Evolution of Party Politics in Texas, 1973-2006: Tracing the Emergence of a Partisan Legislature
CIG Working Paper No. 23
Mark P. Jones, Rice University
Juan Pablo Micozzi, Rice University
Greg Vonnahme, Rice University
April 11, 2006 (Updated April 12, 2006)

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Interval Properties of Ideal Point Estimators
CIG Working Paper No. 24
Scott W. Desposato, UC San Diego
April 12, 2006 (Updated April 13, 2006)

In this paper, I examine the impact of party-switching on legislator's roll-call votes in Brazil. About one-third of deputies change party during each four year term; some change as many as seven times. Such volatility challenges basic concepts of representation -- if legislators change their policy positions to accomodate their new party, they violate the basic utility of party labels for electoral information cost reduction. This research has an additional utility. Legislative scholars agree that political parties are important parts of modern democracy, but roll-call based measures of party influence cannot separate out the influence of legislators own preferences and party directives. Analyzing the behavior of switchers before and after they change party gives us leverage on this and the ongoing "do parties matter" debates. I find significant and consistent party effects on legislative behavior, even when controlling for executive influence.

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Bill Scheduling and Legislative Control
CIG Working Paper No. 25
Jernej Copic, California Institute of Technology
Jonathan N. Katz, California Institute of Technology
April 12, 2006

Measuring Spatial Aspects of Legislative Delay: Evidence from the Chilean Congress
CIG Working Paper No. 26
Cristobal Aninat, Universidad Adolfo Ibanez
John Londregan, Princeton University
April 13, 2006

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Liberal Democracy as an "Aborted" Communist Reovolution
CIG Working Paper No. 27
Antoni Cabrales, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Antoni Calvo-Armengol, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Universite de Toulouse
Leonard Wantchekon, New York University
April 20, 2006

We propose a model of the transition from a "big man" authoritarian regime to either a liberal democracy or a communist regime. An underground organization votes on whether to summon a mass event. If it is summoned, the organization members decide whether to put effort into the event. Higher effort makes regime change more likely, but it is individually risky. This creates the possibility, in principle, of high and low effort equilibria. But we show, using weak dominance arguments, that only the high effort equilibrium is "credible." Thus, internal party democracy is shown to be an efficiency enhancing element for political transitions. We extend the model to show that other internal organization aspects are key for the existence and welfare properties of this equilibrium. Finally, we also show when is the process likely to end up in either democracy (and its "quality") or a full communist regime.

From Community Control to the Penal State: The Ironies of History
CIG Working Paper No. 28 (Abstract Only)
Pieter Spierenburg, Erasmus University and UC Berkeley
April 27, 2006

Recent work on the history of social control in Europe shows that, for a long time, formal control by state agencies was only one, perhaps minor form within the spectrum of discipline and regulation. Church meetings, guilds and other workplace organizations, charitable institutions and neighborhood associations all were important arenas for non-state control. Moreover, the inhabitants of local communities exercised social control over each other. In the course of the modern period state regulation gradually increased in importance, in particular since the emergence of the police (from about 1830). Nevertheless, industrial paternalism characterized labor relations and communal controls remained vigorous until the mid-twentieth century. By the 1980s, politicians in various European countries suddenly realized that community supervision had disappeared and tried to recreate it. This movement was visible in the United States as well, in the form of neighborhood surveillance projects. Nevertheless, the main trend in the US, and to a lesser extent in European countries, was toward the "penal state." A second paradox lies in the cultural background of social control. For centuries, informal controls could be effective because their legitimacy depended upon a less exclusive sense of privacy. Modern projects of informal supervision, therefore, cannot succeed unless they respect the contemporary boundaries of privacy. Within the context of the penal state, however, respect for privacy is not regarded as a virtue, as evidenced by the availability of criminal records on the internet.

Acting Tough: The Politics and Policy of Mass Incarceration in Arizona, 1970-2000
CIG Working Paper No. 29 (Abstract Only)
Mona Lynch, San Jose State University
April 27, 2006

This paper examines the transition in Arizona's punishment policies and practices from the late 1970s through the 1980s, when the state developed into a national leader in penal harshness, both in breadth and style. I explore how the turmoil that characterized state penal institutions in the 1970s opened up the possibility for the mass incarceration boom of the subsequent two decades. Specifically, I examine how state actors--the governor, legislators, criminal justice personnel, and federal district judges--all worked to resolve the crises that dominated this period, and through such attempts tried to redefine the fundamental values and mission of the state's penal system. This crisis management mode, coupled with new legal demands on penal administrators and other outside forces, led to widespread skepticism about rehabilitation as an aim of penality and to subsequent calls to return to a more punitive approach. Thus the 1980s ushered a long period of ideological and operational stability, characterized by harshness and austerity toward penal subjects, that is exemplary of the contemporary penal state in many jurisdictions. The new regime was widely and enthusiastically accepted among the majority of the populace, within the legislature and in the executive branch, resulting in unprecedented levels of penal funding for building and operating new institutions, fueling the explosion of incarceration in the state.

The Governmentality of Welfare and Criminal Justice Policies
CIG Working Paper No. 30
Joshua Guetzkos, Harvard University
April 27, 2006

In recent decades, the U.S. has witnessed the unprecedented expansion of the criminal justice system in the face of welfare retrenchment. Are these two developments related? Well-established accounts focus on either welfare or criminal justice, ignoring the potential link between them. When a connection is asserted, both policy arenas tend to be treated as functionally equivalent forms of social control or labor market regulation. But this perspective imputes motives on the actions of government officials, taking seriously neither the discourse of policy-makers, nor the political struggles and institutional factors that affect policy. In this paper I take a cultural approach to understanding the relationship between these two policy arenas, and their recent historical trajectories, by analyzing congressional discourse on welfare and criminal justice policy-making in two periods: 1961-1967 and 1981-1996. I show how conceptions about the causes of poverty and crime, about the poor and criminals, and about the role of government in each period are similar; and how changes in these conceptions have entailed different policy solutions over time. I discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of the punitive turn in both criminal justice and welfare policies over the last forty years.

Reexamining the Death Penalty: Capital Punishment in the Reform of the Model Penal Code
CIG Working Paper No. 31 (Abstract Only)
Franklin Zimring, UC Berkeley
April 27, 2006

The American Law Institute has launched a revision of its Model Penal Code provisions on sentencing and punishment that will be comprehensive in almost all respects. Conspicuously missing from the new sentencing project, however, is any examination of the Model Penal Code's provisions on capital punishment. I argue that a reexamination of capital punishment is both necessary and practical as part of the larger sentencing reform project. Avoiding the death penalty is unprincipled and would leave the Model Code's single weakest section standing while every other sentencing provision would be subject to scrutiny. Failure to consider capital punishment would also ignore 40 years of radical change in both the penal policy of developed nations and the vocabulary of concern that had redefined the death penalty as an issue of human rights and limits of government power. Ignoring the death penalty would launch a reform effort that would ignore the punishment for murder while rethinking everything else. Nothing short of terror at the political cost can explain this retreat from the natural boundaries of sentencing reform.

The Failure of Race Neutral Policies
CIG Working Paper No. 32
Traci Schlesinger, Princeton University
April 27, 2006

In the past quarter-century, incarceration rates have risen precipitously and racial disparity has deepened, with African Americans experiencing an incarceration rate seven times that for Whites. This is particularly striking when criminal processing "reforms" meant to attenuate discriminatory disparities in punishment outcomes were enacted in every state and at the federal level during the 1980s and 1990s. To understand how and why these "determinate sentencing" policies failed to achieve their desired effect, I examine the effects of mandatory terms, sentencing enhancements, parole abolition, and truth-in-sentencing statutes on individual-level sentence length and time served using data on criminal justice policies collected from current and past state criminal codes and data on sentence length and time from the National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP).

When Power and Responsibility Collide: An Analysis of the Conflicting Role of the State Behind Bars in Johnson v. California
CIG Working Paper No. 33 (Abstract Only)
Kellie Bryant, UC Berkeley
April 27, 2006

Since the end of penal welfarism in the 1970s, prisons in the United States have served as human warehouses, with carceral management focused primarily on maintaining a secure environment through the minimization of violence between inmates. California's prison system has faced a particularly difficult and hazardous situation in this regard, due not only to gross overcrowding but also to the prevalence of racially aligned prison gangs. The California Department of Corrections has attempted to curtail violence between these gangs by utilizing an unwritten policy of segregation separating new admits based on race/ethnicity during the intake and classification process. In 2005 the Supreme Court ruled that this policy was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. Their decision in Johnson v. California pitted the power of the government to punish and control criminal offenders with the government's responsibility to protect the rights of all citizens. Drawing upon both legal and sociological thought, this paper examines the Court's decision, the role of the state in exercising its power to punish, and the state's responsibility to protect Constitutional rights.

The Place of the Prison in the New Government of Poverty
CIG Working Paper No. 34
Loic Wacquant, UC Berkeley
April 27, 2006

How to conceptualize the recent expansion and activation of the penal state (not only the police, courts, and corrections but segments of the welfare apparatus) observable across the First and Second Worlds? What are their efficient causes and enduring functions? To clear the ground for a theory of the penal upsurge that has accompanied the rise of social insecurity in the age of triumphant neoliberalism, I first present a theoretical and empirical critique of the demonic myth of the "prison industrial complex." Next, I return to the writings of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber to show the centrality of penality in their conception of modern society. Third, I mate these classical principles with insights from Bourdieu, Foucault, T.H. Marshall, and Esping-Andersen to construct a robust concept of the penal state covering structure, policy, and discourses and giving it a central role as a stratifying force and classificatory machinery.

Squid in its Own Ink: Considering Race, Inequality, and Punishment in the Expansion of the Prison in Rural America
CIG Working Paper No. 35
John Eason, University of Chicago
April 27, 2006

The effects of prisons on rural America have been understudied, leaving untouched various misconceptions of the "prison town." Forty years ago most, small towns protested the siting of prisons, incinerators, and other public works projects that city planners labeled LULU's (Locally Undesirable Land Uses). Around the mid-1980s, this trend shifted drastically, as many small rural towns took to campaigning actively to win the placement of a prison. The purpose of this study is to examine the causes of this shift and to document the subsequent effects that prisons have on small towns of the American hinterland, including the political, social, and cultural ramification of their presence and the role that rural towns dependent on continued prison growth play in facilitating the further expansion of the criminal justice system. The prison town provides a lens through which to understand why the U.S. has more than two million people held captive in over 1,660 correctional facilities and shed light on the different purposes of social control and new conceptions of punishment.

Forensic Psychiatry Imagines the Sex Offender: Lombroso and De River
CIG Working Paper No. 36
Chrysanthi Leon, UC Berkeley
April 27, 2006

At a time when the public, politicians, and law enforcement focus on sex offenders, sociology and criminology are practically silent, and marginalized forensic psychiatry has held onto the sex offender as its remaining domain. Forensic psychiatry has not only largely lost the non-sex criminal offender as a subject, but it is also almost entirely absent from universities, and all the access and resources that academic affiliation includes. If we pursue the manifest and latent effects of this balkanization of knowledge regarding the sex offender, we can better understand current policy as well as plan for the future. Post WWII, populist discourse and forensic psychiatry--both reflecting Lombrosan notions of criminality--demanded that legislators respond to sex crime. In this paper I examine the parallels and divergences between this period and the Megan's Law era (mid-1990s through the present). I argue that our contemporary notion of the sex offender as paradoxically both willful and diseased grew from forensic psychiatry and its attempts to create and maintain a field of expertise.

Cheap Work: The Use and Abuse of Parolees in the Day Labor Industry
CIG Working Paper No. 37 (Abstract Only)
Gretchen Purser, UC Berkeley
April 27, 2006

The more than 600,000 inmates released from state and federal prisons each year face extremely bleak employment prospects. One industry which aims to make use of this ultra-"flexibilized" and demonized labor supply is the nation's multi-billion dollar day labor industry. This presentation entails a preliminary analysis of both the specific mechanisms wherein ex-offenders are channeled into day labor agencies by parole officers and social service agents as well as day labor companies' active participation in city and state-based prisoner reentry programs. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork at a leading day labor company, I examine the company's use of a "work as redemption" moral frame for purposes of labor force recruitment and disciplining. Offering an "honest day's pay for an honest day's work," day labor companies claim to fuel both individual and business growth in a "win-win situation." On the contrary, the low-wage, unstable, contingent work available through day labor agencies traps workers in a cycle of poverty, insecurity and structural unemployment that dramatically increases their chances of recidivism.

Subversion and Penal States
CIG Working Paper No. 38 (Abstract Only)
Jonathan Simon, UC Berkeley
April 27, 2006

How does the threat of extraordinary subversion play out in states that have already developed extensive carceral systems? From Anarchism in Italy and the United States in the 1890s through the Dirty War in Argentina in the 1970s to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States, episodes of political subversion generate state responses that are penal as well as military. This paper explores these historical examples for insight into two questions: What kind of residues from these episodes of political subversion and counter-repression leave in the penal imagination of these societies (Lombroso wrote extensively about criminal anarchism)? How does the enormous expansion of the penal state in the United States during the war on crime influence the "war on terror" that has followed the most recent experience of subversion?

A Movement in Theory? Resistance and Criticism in the Contemporary Prison Abolition Movement
CIG Working Paper No. 39
Damon Mayrl, UC Berkeley
April 27, 2006

Based on extended participant observation, this paper explores the beliefs and practices of Critical Resistance (CR), a leading organization in the prison abolition movement. In particular, it looks at one of CR's most notable features: the extensive amount of time it spends developing, elaborating, and deploying a theory of the "prison-industrial complex." In this paper, I argue that the centrality of theory in the prison abolition movement is the product of its position in a field of social justice activists. The elaboration of "abolitionist theory" enables the group to recoup positive benefits within the social justice field. At the same time, the focus on theory has negative consequences for the group's stated goal of building a mass-based movement of " those most affected" by the rise of the penal state.

Birth of a Movement? Activists Mobilizing for the Rights of Ex-Felons
CIG Working Paper No. 40 (Abstract Only)
Mark Toney, UC Berkeley
April 27, 2006

Sanctions against people who are convicted of crimes extend far beyond the time for which they are incarcerated or on parole or probation through policies and practices that condone discrimination against people with criminal records in the areas of employment, housing, public benefits, child custody, and political representation. The disproportionate impact of post-incarceration discrimination on young Black men and their families in low-income communities, especially widespread voter disfranchisement and job market exclusion, has triggered growing activism to secure basic rights for all formerly incarcerated people. My research has identified three key groups that are responsible for the recent expansion of reentry activism: policy advocates, service providers, and formerly incarcerated activists. Specific examples of their contributions to the four key factors necessary to build a social movement--opportunity, mobilization, framing, and action--will be the subject of my presentation.

Framing Strategies and Racial Privilege: Bridging the "Gap" Between Activists and Prisoners
CIG Working Paper No. 41
Jodie Lawston, UC San Diego
April 27, 2006

This paper probes the disconnect between prison activists and the population they aim to defend. Activists in the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), a women's prison organization which purports to represent female prisoners inside of three of California's women's penal institutions (Valley State Prison for Women, Central California Women's Facility at Chowchilla, and the California Institute for Women), are predominantly white, middle-class, highly educated and politically radical while the intended beneficiaries of their activism are predominantly of color, poor, and institutionally uneducated, in addition to being confined, silenced, and invisible from U.S. society at large. Acutely aware of the stark contrast between themselves and prisoners, as well as the privileges they enjoy from the very system they oppose, women in CCWP work to bridge themselves to their "sisters inside" while remaining conscious of the power differentials that separate them. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with both inmates and activists, I show that it is imperative for activists to see themselves, and to be seen by others, as representing the needs and interests of incarcerated women. In this frame, gender becomes the one pivotal property used to reconcile the dilemmas with which activists grapple. Yet, despite a broader radical agenda, activists end up affirming a conventional understanding of women's incarceration and abusive treatment by the legal system.

From Community Control to the Penal State: The Ironies of History
CIG Working Paper No. 42
Alexandra Murphy, Princeton University
April 27, 2006

Against the backdrop of a long history of antagonism between African Americans and law-enforcement agencies, scholars and policymakers have recently identified a "crisis of legitimacy" in the relationships of black Americans to the courts, police, and other components of the criminal justice system. African Americans have less faith than their white counterparts that police are there to serve them and protect person and property. This paper examines the mechanisms that African Americans have developed for maintaining social order and ensuring a minimal level of personal and public safety in the absence of an effective and responsive justice apparatus. It documents how a poor, predominantly black urban community developed such "indigenous" resources for resolving disputes and attending to delinquent and criminal behavior. This sphere of justice is contrasted with "state-sanctioned" judicial procedures, such as community policing or conventional prosecution via the courts. This development of is replaced within a global context, both pointing to the ways in which the relationship between indigenous forms of social order maintenance and state sanctioned law-enforcement practices are shaped by global political and economic shifts as well as noting the rise in such developments across the globe.

Implementing Police Reform in Sarkozy's France
CIG Working Paper No. 44
Kevin Gerard Karpiak, UC Berkeley
April 27, 2006

As liberal political and economic forms become more entrenched in Europe, the role and practical limits of the State become increasingly problematic. This manifests itself alternately as a challenge to the moral authority of the French State or its legitimation as the necessarily violent and repressive grounds of democratic possibility. In France, the Police Nationale serves as both the practical arm and paradigmatic symbol of state intervention. The police, as a centralized state institution, is charged with, and understood to personify, the problem of how to put into practice the assemblage of reformatory orientations and impulsions generally labeled "neo-liberal." The tension between interventionist state policy and more laissez-faire approaches get expressed in the debate over the relative merits of two models of policing: the police de proximitá ("community policing"), a socially-oriented strategy of urban policing, and the culture de résultats ("culture of results"), whose proponents argue is more "effective" due to its "economic" use of police efforts. This paper, based on extensive ethnographic research among police officers in metropolitan France, investigates the seemingly contradictory logics of police administration and reform as they map out this new terrain of contemporary policing. What is at stake in contemporary debates surrounding the reorganization of the French police is not only the quantitative question of "how much" policing is desirable for a liberal democracy, nor a delimitation of the contours of what would constitute a legitimate form of police practice, but also the very moral authority upon which State action is grounded.

Bodies of Force: A Field Report on the Fabrication of Cops
CIG Working Paper No. 45 (Abstract Only)
Brian Lande, UC Berkeley
April 27, 2006

How does the penal state produce those agents that will proficiently and efficiently wield the the physical force whose legitimate use it purports to monopolize? Drawing on the early results of an ongoing carnal ethnography of the crafting of police officers in a Bay Area police academy, I describe and analyze the concrete drills, pedagogical tasks and techniques, group activities and individual ordeals through which recruits imbibe and gradually embody the mix of technical knowledge, moral sensibilities, collective emotions, and personal desires that make them competent candidates to the exercise of police authority.

Punishment and Inequality in America in the Era of the Prison Boom
CIG Working Paper No. 46
Bruce Western, Princeton University
April 27, 2006

This talk will summarize several of the main findings reported in my forthcoming book on the growth and consequences of incarceration in American over the last three decades. I will present evidence that incarceration has become a normal event in the lives of disadvantaged African-American men. Among those born since the late 1960s, serving time in prison has become more likely than college graduation or enrolling in the military. The emergence of mass imprisonment has contributed to a uniquely American form of social inequality. Imprisonment affects in inequality in two main ways: first by concealing large numbers of poor black men from conventional statistics on the economic well-being; second by diminishing the economic opportunities of ex-prisoners after release. These developments indicate that the prison boom has increased inequalities among blacks, and significantly diminished the quality of African American citizenship.

The Effects of Male Incarceration Dynamics on AIDS Infection Rates among African-American Women and Men
CIG Working Paper No. 47
Rucker C. Johnson and Stephen Raphael, UC Berkeley
April 27, 2006

We investigate the potential connection between incarceration dynamics and AIDS infection rates, with a particular emphasis on the black-white AIDS rate disparity. Using case-level data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we construct a panel data set of AIDS infection rates covering the period 1982 to 2001 that vary by year of onset, mode of transmission, state of residence, age, gender, and race/ethnicity. Using data from the U.S. Census, we construct a conforming panel of male and female incarceration rates. We use this panel data to model the dynamic relationship between the male and female AIDS infection rates and the proportion of men in the age/state/race-matched cohort that are incarcerated. We find very strong effects of male incarceration rates on both male and female AIDS infection rates. Our results reveal that the higher incarceration rates among black males over this period explain a substantial share of the racial disparity in AIDS infection between black women and women of other ethnic groups. Relatedly, we estimate a two-stage-least-squares (TSLS) model of AIDS infection rates employing a set of variables describing intra-state changes in sentencing regimes as instruments for variation in incarceration rates. We find TSLS effects of incarceration rates on AIDS infection rates that are significant and comparable in magnitude to the corresponding OLS estimates.

Impact of Incarceration on Racial Disparities in Mental and Physical Health After Release
CIG Working Paper No. 48 (Abstract Only)
Michael Massoglia, Pennsylvania State University
May 2, 2006

This paper addresses two basic questions. First, it examines whether incarceration has a lasting impact on health functioning. Secondly, because blacks are more likely than whites to be exposed to the negative effects of the penal system--including fractured social bonds, reduced labor market prospects, and high levels of infectious disease--it considers whether the penal system contributes to racial health disparities. Using multiple analytical procedures and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the paper is the first to empirically demonstrate that incarceration exerts lasting effects on health, and to show that racial differences in health between whites and blacks are explained largely by racial differences in rates of imprisonment.

Paternal Incarceration, the Prison Boom, and the Concentration of Childhood Disadvantage
CIG Working Paper No. 49
Chris Wildeman, Princeton University
April 27, 2006

The lifetime of risk of incarceration for men has changed drastically in recent years --especially for minority men with low levels of education-- and the periods of highest risk of incarceration also coincide closely with the peak years of childbearing and family formation. In this paper, I tie the research on incarceration and the research on family structure together by considering the changing risk of paternal incarceration across two cohorts: the cohort of children born in 1965 and 1980. By treating a child's number of years living in their parents' household as a lifetime, I consider how the risk of paternal incarceration varies across these two cohorts by age, race, and father’s level of education, and discuss how rapidly rising high rates of incarceration impact family formation in the black community.

American Capital Punishment: A Theoretical Problem for Sociological Analysis
CIG Working Paper No. 50
David Garland, New York University
April 27, 2006

Capital punishment may be seen as the highest expression of the power of the penal state. Yet the forms and functions of capital punishment, as practiced in 21st century America, are not well understood by sociological theory. The interpretive frameworks found in the sociological literature are mostly premised upon historical rather than contemporary practices, while the legal and criminological studies that do engage with the contemporary are primarily concerned with legal and moral critique rather than sociological understanding. This paper develops a theoretical account of the modern American death penalty. Drawing on historical and comparative research, and addressing the distinctive characteristics of the American polity and group relations, the analysis aims to explain the specific forms through which capital punishment is currently administered and the social uses to which it is put.

Policy Feedback on a Captive Audience: How Prison Cultures Shape Civic Attitudes and Behavior
CIG Working Paper No. 51 (Abstract Only)
Amy Lerman, UC Berkeley
April 27, 2006

For an increasingly large segment of ethnic minority and low-income populations, relationships with representatives of government are more likely to be forged within criminal justice institutions --via the police, courts and prisons-- than with elected officials. Living inside a prison setting may inculcate people with certain values, identities, attitudes towards authority, as well as coping mechanisms. Some of these socialized responses may be incompatible with the schemas, skills and resources necessary for active participation in the civic life of a functional democratic community. Using data from the state of California, as well as original data collected through a large-scale survey of California Correctional Officers, this study seeks to understand the effects of prison culture on the political attitudes and behaviors of incarcerated people once they leave prison. The central arguments discussed are that (1) the experience of incarceration affects the future civic lives of inmates, (2) different characteristics of the prison environment have different types and degrees of effect, and (3) the attitudes and behaviors of Correctional Officers shape these prison environments in critical ways.

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