Theme Panels

Table of Contents

Review the panels selected by our Program Chairs Amaney Jamal, Princeton University, and Susan Hyde, University of California, Berkeley, due to their exploration of the theme “The Quest for Legitimacy: Actors, Audiences, and Aspirations.”

Authors Meet Critics: Parties, Movements, and Democracy in the Developing World
 This volume analyzes regime politics in the developing world – including Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. By focusing on the civilian, collective actors that forge democracy and sustain it, this book moves beyond materialist arguments focusing on GDP, poverty, and inequality. With case material from four continents, this volume emphasizes the decisive role played by parties and movements in forging democracy against the odds. These pivotal collectivities are consistently the key civilian collectivities that successfully mobilized for democracy, that helped forge enduring democratic institutions, and that shaped the quality of the democracies that emerged; they are the ones tasked with mobilizing along a range of social cleavages, confronting seemingly inhospitable conditions, coordinating the process of regime change, and seeking to advance (or hinder) political legitimacy (the theme of the 2017 APSA conference). While the presence of parties and movements alone is not sufficient to explain the founding and legitimacy of democracy, their absence is detrimental to enduring democratic regimes. Thus, this volume refocuses our attention on parties and movements as critical mechanisms of regime change.

Participants

Deborah Yashar, Princeton University (Chair)
Robert R. Kaufman, Rutgers University, New Brunswick (Presenter)
Daniel F. Ziblatt, Harvard University (Presenter)
Nancy Bermeo, Princeton University (Presenter)
Erik Martinez Kuhonta, McGill University (Presenter)
Rachel Beatty Riedl, Northwestern University (Presenter)
Kenneth M. Roberts, Cornell University (Presenter)
Maya Jessica Tudor, Oxford University (Presenter)
David Waldner, (Presenter)

 

Black Lives Matter: Racial Politics and Social Justice in the Age of Obama and the New Trump Era

Participants on this panel will explore the following questions: What does the Black Lives Matter Movement tell us about race, white supremacy, and economic inequality in the age of Obama? What will a Trump presidency mean for the movement for black lives

Participants

Michael Javen Fortner, CUNY (Chair)
Cathy J. Cohen, University of Chicago (Presenter)
Jennifer L. Hochschild, Harvard University (Presenter)
Doug McAdam, Stanford University (Presenter)
Lester Kenyatta Spence, Johns Hopkins University (Presenter)
Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, Princeton University (Presenter)

 

Causes and Consequences of Legitimacy in Areas of Limited Statehood

For decades, questions about the legitimacy and effectiveness of governance have been prominent in political science. Yet, we still know little about their mutual interplay, particularly in areas of limited statehood i.e. domestic polities where the state lacks the ability to implement and enforce central decisions and/or monopoly over the use of force. Taking areas of limited statehood as the circumstantial backdrop for this panel allows for new theoretical questions and empirical insight regarding the relationship between effectiveness and legitimacy. The panel focuses on state, non-state and external governance actors, and presents an empirically applicable model for theorizing how effectiveness and legitimacy may mutually impact one another. Based on the empirical findings and different perspectives of the contributions, the panel’s common theme is that the interplay between effective and legitimate governance in areas of limited statehood is far more complex than often assumed. Neither is effective governance a guarantee for more legitimacy, nor is higher legitimacy always connected to more effective governance. This calls for new evaluations of the legitimacy-effectiveness nexus for areas of limited statehood, but also carries important policy implications.

The contribution by Cord Schmelzle and Eric Stollenwerk (1) points out how areas of limited statehood may challenge some of our core assumptions regarding effective and legitimate governance, and the interplay thereof. Particularly three factors deserve attention when analyzing effective and legitimate governance in areas of limited statehood: Governance contributions by external and non-state governance actors, the limited capacity of the state, and various other sources of governance actors’ legitimacy. Taking this into account the paper presents a new theoretical model of a virtuous circle between effective and legitimate governance in areas of limited statehood. This model underlines that the relationship between effective and legitimate governance in areas of limited statehood may be more complex than often assumed. The second paper by Margaret Levi (2) focuses specifically on the effectiveness-legitimacy interplay for non- or partial- states. What kind of resources do non-state actors have to prevent free riding? What are the sources of their legitimacy? For states, legitimacy supposedly allows for more effective rule at lower costs, but what are the consequences of legitimacy for non-state actors? This paper presents conceptual clarifications and empirical examples regarding the causes and consequences of non-state actors’ legitimacy in areas of limited statehood. The third contribution by David Remmert and Gregor Walter-Drop (3) adds a policy oriented perspective to the panel. This paper argues for a legitimacy centered approach when engaging in state-building in areas of limited statehood. The authors show that questions of legitimacy have often only played a marginal role in state-building efforts so far. The paper uses Germany’s stabilization approach in Afghanistan as an example to underline that legitimacy should take a key role in any state-building effort. They provide detailed policy recommendations of how to take local concepts of legitimacy seriously and advocate a closer knowledge transfer between political science and practitioners engaged in state-building in areas of limited statehood. The fourth and final paper by Aila Matanock (4) looks at external efforts to strengthen the rule of law in areas of limited statehood. Specifically, this contribution analyzes how such external efforts impact the effectiveness and legitimacy of the rule of law. Using the engagement of external actors in Mali and other cases as examples, the paper analyses which domestic actors or parts of the population give consent to such external involvement in the country and how this affects external actors’ legitimacy and effectiveness. In sum, this panel helps to better understand the relationship between effective and legitimate governance in areas of limited statehood from both a theoretical as well as from an empirical perspective.

Participants
William G. Nomikos, Yale University (Chair)
Sabrina Karim, (Discussant)

 

Papers:
Governance Effectiveness and Legitimacy: Virtuous or Vicious Circle?
Eric Stollenwerk, Freie Universitaet Berlin (Author)
Cord Schmelzle, (Non-Presenting Co-Author)

Perceptions of Legitimacy
Margaret Levi, Stanford University (Author)

Beyond the Ballot Box:Towards a Legitimacy-Centered Approach To State-Building
David Remmert, Freie Universität Berlin (Author)
Gregor Walter-Drop, Freie Universität Berlin (Non-Presenting Co-Author)

Legitimate Consent? Delegating Sovereignty on Rule of Law Roles in Weak States
Aila M. Matanock, University of California-Berkeley (Author)

 

Classical Reflections on Democracy and Legitimacy

Recent years have seen a growth in skepticism concerning the legitimacy of democratic institutions. As tensions emerge between liberal justifications of popular rule and the outcomes of democratic procedures, the epistemic and ethical capacities of the people have become pressing topics of discussion for political scientists and pundits alike. Far from novel, these questions bring us back to the roots of democratic theory in ancient Greece. This panel will focus on this early moment in democratic theory, investigating a range of underexplored Athenian responses to the questions of what the dêmos is capable of and how these capacities should be evaluated. Looking beyond the well-known arguments of Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, our panelists illuminate the breadth of ancient Greek thinking about democratic knowledge, virtue, and capacity.

Participants:

Kinch Hoekstra, University of California, Berkeley (Chair)
Ryan Balot, University of Toronto (Discussant)
Matthew Landauer, University of Chicago (Discussant)

 Papers:
Recognizing Virtue: The Cognitive Capacity of the Dêmos in Thucydides
Mark Fisher, University of California, Berkeley (Author)

Demotic Agency in Classical Athens
John T. Lombardini, College of Williams and Mary (Author)

City as Text: Reflection, Judgment, and Democratic Attunement
Elizabeth Markovits, Mount Holyoke College (Author)

Man, the Measurer: Promethean Utilitarianism in Plato’s Protagoras
Seth N. Jaffe (Author)


Democracy, Distrust, and Digital Publics

How might this new era of “post-truth politics,” alternative facts, and fake news threaten the legitimacy of democratic processes? The hacking of public opinion, Tenove argues, demands the creation of normative grounds for determining when digital interventions are illegitimate. Drawing on the Western philosophical tradition, Krupicka examines the implications of voters’ use of the frames of honesty and authenticity in evaluating Clinton and Trump. Rather than putting the traditional media in place as gatekeepers, Forestal invokes Dewey to argue for the creation of digital platforms that promote collective social inquiry and democratic politics. Observing that public facts have always been fabrication, Neame turns to a reading of Arendt’s “Truth and Politics” to reconcile authoritative public knowledge with democratic freedom.

Participants”
Paisley Currah, CUNY, Brooklyn College; CUNY, Graduate Center (Chair)

 

Papers:
Hacking Public Opinion: Digital Threats to Democratic Processes
Chris Tenove, University of Toronto (Author)

Honesty and Authenticity: Truthfulness and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
Benjamin T. Krupicka, Wesleyan University (Author)

With a Thousand Lies & a Good Disguise: On Propaganda & Digital Publics
Jennifer Forestal, Stockton University (Author)

The Worldliness of Truth in Politics
Alexandra Catherine Neame, Northwestern University (Author)

Democratic Legitimacy & Violence against Women: Policymaking in the Global South

When states fail to respond to violence against women, this is a threat to democratic legitimacy. Governments lose the acceptance of their citizens as an authority when they leave them vulnerable to violence — in the streets and in the home. Women in particular feel that their government does not serve them if it cannot protect them from everyday insecurity. However, it is only in the past decades that violence against women has been seen as an issue that can and should be legitimately addressed by the state, rather than being a private matter that should be addressed within the family or the church.

This panel investigates the ongoing struggle for creating and upholding violence against women policies in countries from the global south. With cases from Latin America, South Asia, and the Middle East, these papers speak directly to the theme of this year’s conference, The Quest for Legitimacy. We examine, on the one hand, how states decide to acknowledge gender-based violence as a viable policy concern, and, on the other, how powerful cultural, political, and societal forces coalesce to undermine the effective implementation of laws established to curb violence against women. In analyzing how policies are formulated and challenged, we evaluate a wide range of actors involved in the articulation of what constitutes violence and against whom violence should be regulated. Among other questions, we ask: under what conditions does violence against women effectively become a legitimate concern for the state, and how are these claims challenged and delegitimized?

Each of the papers included in the panel draw from ethnographic research conducted by the respective scholars. Cheryl O’Brien and Shannon Drysdale Walsh conduct a structured, focused comparison of progressive advocacy for violence against women laws and conservative opposition to policies and implementation in Mexico and Nicaragua. Pamela Neumann focuses on the Nicaraguan case and shows how the concentration of power by President Ortega, combined with his political alliance with conservative religious elites, led to the unraveling of the country’s comprehensive law on gender-based violence passed in 2012. Runa Das focuses on South Asia’s post-9/11 geopolitical climate – with the intersecting dangers of modernity, globalization, and terrorism. Das investigates how this context of violence has been used by India-Pakistan’s state leaders to legitimize statist discourses, practices of nuclear securitization, and complex forms of gender violence on South Asian women. Summer Forester analyzes how state securitization affects government action on violence against women policies in Jordan and Kuwait.

All of these papers analyze state failures to protect citizens vulnerable to violence, focusing on women in particular. We also discuss possible pathways out of these failures that can increase democratic legitimacy through improved implementation of violence against women policies and the provision of citizen security more broadly construed.

 

Participants:
Laurel Weldon, Purdue University (Chair)
Celeste M. Montoya, University of Colorado, Boulder (Discussant)
Clifford Bob, Duquesne University (Discussant)

Papers:
Transnational Governance, Local Politics, & the Gender Violence Law in Nicaragua
Pamela Jane Neumann, Tulane University (Author)Conservatives Contesting Feminist, Anti-Violence Against Women Policies
Cheryl O’Brien, San Diego State University (Author)
Shannon Drysdale Walsh, University of Minnesota Duluth (Author)Modernity, Globalization, & Gendered Violence in South Asia’s Security Complex
Runa Das, University of Minnesota Duluth (Author)Does Conflict Make Policy?: Securitization and Women’s Rights in Jordan & Kuwait
Summer Forester, Purdue University (Author)

 

Divided Societies: Comparative Historical Perspectives on Legitimacy

This panel examines the special challenges facing the construction and maintenance of legitimacy in countries that are deeply divided along lines of ethnicity, language, and religion. All four of these papers seek to deepen our understanding of legitimacy by deploying the concepts and tools that are distinctive of the Politics & History division, including a focus on timing, sequencing, and process tracing, as well as the common use of comparative historical research designs. But they focus on very different regions of the world and disparate time periods in a way that would be sure to spark a lively and productive set of conversations. The paper by Naazneen Barma critically addresses the role of international peacekeeping forces in establishing legitimate rule in the aftermath of internal armed conflict in three different countries: Afghanistan, Cambodia, and East Timor. Clair Mcloughlin likewise focuses on a conflict-ridden society, Sri Lanka, but with a view to understanding how the state’s unequal provision of social services between that country’s Sinhalese and Tamil populations set in motion a longstanding process of delegitimation. Turning to Europe, Phillip James Howe focuses on a practice, consociationalism, that many scholars have seen as the most viable way to construct legitimate rule in divided societies (though others have emphasized the ultimately damaging effects of consociational practices on legitimacy). Finally, Berk Esen’s paper asks why some ethnic minority groups rejected the legitimacy of Ottoman rule in the 19th century (Serbians and Greeks) while others remained loyal to the imperial center (Albanians, Kurds, and Arabs), with important consequences for later movements toward national independence. All of these papers are ambitious in the theoretical goals that the authors have set for themselves, and together they would constitute a panel that is coherent and yet wide-ranging in its focus on how legitimacy has been challenged, constructed, and contested in different world regions and at different points in time. Each will deepen our understanding of this year’s conference theme.

Participants:
James Mahoney, Northwestern University (Chair)
Sebastián Mazzuca, Johns Hopkins University (Discussant)
Sigrun Kahl, Yale University (Discussant)

Papers:
Education and State De-Legitimation in Sri Lanka
Claire Mcloughlin, University of Birmingham (Author)

Habsburg Legacies and Consociationalism in Interwar Austria and Czechoslovakia
Philip James Howe, Adrian College (Author)

Mobilizing to Secede: Nations in Making during the late Ottoman Empire
Berk Esen, Bilkent University (Author)

Peacebuilding Interventions in Historical Institutionalist Perspective
Naazneen Barma, Naval Postgraduate School (Author)

 

Europe’s Perfect Storm

Europe is facing an intertwined set of crises that threaten national liberal democracies and have shaken the project of European integration to its very core. Britain’s Brexit referendum outcome triggered a process that will lead a member state leaving the EU for the first time in its history. The refugee crisis remains far from resolved: although the flow of refugees has slowed, thousands continue to drown in the Mediterranean, the EU’s controversial deal with Turkey to stem the flow is at risk of collapse, and tensions over security and immigrant integration are mounting in many member states. Liberal democracy has given way to electoral autocracy in Hungary, and Poland is moving rapidly in the same direction. The governments in both countries openly challenge the EU’s liberal democratic values. Far-right populists are on the rise in many states, and national elections in France, Germany, and the Netherlands this year may see them make significant gains. The simmering Eurozone crisis threatens to erupt again this year in Italy and Greece. Meanwhile, Russia’s ongoing aggression in Ukraine and its meddling in domestic politics of European democracies is testing the EU’s ability to maintain a common foreign and security policy. Together, these crises constitute a ‘perfect storm’ that threatens the legitimacy and the very survival of the post-war order established over the past six decades focused on liberal democracy and European integration. This roundtable will bring together leading experts on European politics to analyze the causes and consequences of these intersecting crises.

Participants:
Daniel Kelemen, Rutgers University, New Brunswick (Chair)
Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Stanford University (Presenter)
Sheri Berman,; Barnard College, Columbia University (Presenter)
Sergio Fabbrini, Luiss Guido Carli (Presenter)
Matthias Matthijs, Johns Hopkins University (Presenter)
Kimberly J. Morgan, George Washington University (Presenter)
Craig A. Parsons, University of Oregon (Presenter)

 

Experiments in State Capacity and Popular Legitimacy

Papers on this panel offer experimental examinations of the state’s capacity to foster legitimacy and of popular legitimacy for the rule of law.

 Participants:
Adeline Lo. Princeton University (Chair)

 

Papers:
Can Community Policing Expand State Capacity? An experiment in Papua New Guinea
Jasper Jack Cooper, (Author)

Does Cross-Cutting Discussion Reduce Support for Sectarian Politics?
Laura B. Paler, University of Pittsburgh (Author)
Leslie Marshall, University of Pittsburgh (Non-Presenting Co-Author)

Optimal Aggregation Mechanisms for Crisis Bargaining
Brad L. LeVeck, University of California, Merced (Author)

Popular Legitimacy and the Rule of Law: Experimental Evidence from China
Gregory Love, University of Mississippi (Author)
Jennifer Wilking, California State University, Chico (Author)

 

Global Populisms

What are the origins, manifestations and consequences of populism? Populist parties and leaders are surging across the world, in both developed and developing democracies, and yet not enough attention has been paid to the diverse origins and expressions of populism. Why does it take such different forms? What are the common factors that underly populist movements across time and space? When does it arise, and is there a conjuncture or a sequence of events that brings it about? This round table brings together experts working on aspects of populism in a variety of regional and historical settings, including Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. The panel will distinguish the different “populisms” across time and space, explore the theoretical distinctions that differentiate populism from other authoritarian or radical movements, and trace the interaction of populism with religious ideology, economic inequality, and social structures such as identity and class. Finally, the round table will discuss the consequences of populism for liberal democracy and its institutions.

Participants:
Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Stanford University (Chair)
Sheri Berman, Barnard College, Columbia University (Presenter)
Melani Cammett, Harvard University (Presenter)
Julia Lynch, University of Pennsylvania (Presenter)
Pauline Jones Luong, of Michigan (Presenter)
Kathleen R. McNamara, Georgetown University (Presenter)
Kathryn E. Stoner, Stanford University (Presenter)

How Political Scientists Can Create Effective Public Engagement

In the panel we discuss the process of writing for a general audience and the utility and appropriateness of using political science research as a lens to analyze relevant questions related to current events.

As Americans enter a period where the legitimacy of some political institutions, norms, and procedures are disrupted, political blogs provide a venue for social scientists to bring empirical, theoretical, or normative information to the public sphere in a way that journalists and popular writers may not. Social scientists tend to write primarily for an academic audience in a style that may not translate well to the broader public. However, political scientists have useful and relevant insights to offer, and there’s no need for us to wait for reporters to call us. Political blogs provide an appropriate venue for this type of communication.

We provide direct advice for blogging in terms of style, getting started, writing for other blogs, or starting one’s own blog. We discuss our experiences and what the challenges we think political bloggers face in effective public engagement.

Also, editors from The Monkey Cage will describe its mission, outline submission guidelines, provide advice for writing for this medium, and present evidence of the impact that public engagement can provide to scholars.

Participants:
Jennifer Nicoll Victor, George Mason University (Presenter)
Julia Rezazadeh Azari, Marquette University (Presenter)
Hans Noel, Georgetown University (Presenter)
Gregory Koger, University of Miami (Presenter)
Seth E. Masket, University of Denver (Presenter)
Jonathan M. Ladd, Georgetown University (Presenter)
John W. Patty, University of Chicago (Presenter)
Richard McGrath Skinner, Sunlight Foundation (Presenter)
John M. Sides, George Washington University (Presenter)
Henry Farrell, George Washington University (Presenter)
E.J. Graff, (Presenter)
Laura Seay, Colby College (Presenter)
Joshua A. Tucker, New York University (Presenter)

 

Identity Politics and the 2016 US Presidential Election

Even though Hillary Clinton received almost 2.9 million more votes than Donald Trump, the post-election story focused on “identity politics” as the primary culprit in Clinton’s defeat in the Electoral College. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin tipped the electoral college in Donald Trump’s favor with just seventy-seven thousand votes among them, with many scholars and pundits pointing to dissatisfied white rural communities as the engine of Donald Trump’s nationalist agenda. Donald Trump kicked off his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and promising to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. Prior to the Iowa Caucus, Trump announced a plan to register all Muslims in the country, and ban travel from Muslim countries. Throughout his campaign, the Black Lives Matter movement was a constant foil for the Trump campaign, giving fuel to calls to improve “law and order” across the country. Bernie Sanders, a Senator from Vermont who dogged Clinton throughout the Democratic primary with a leftist populist message that appealed largely to whites, claimed that the Democrats needed to move away from identity politics and back to the mainstream. But perhaps more than any election since the Civil Rights movement, issues of race dominated the national debate in the run-up to presidential election.

This panel seeks to build upon the scholarship on identity, political participation, and intersectionality by leveraging a unique dataset just after the presidential election. We explore various aspects of this identity politics as they manifested themselves in the election, through the urban/rural divide, political emotions, and Latinx participation. We address the conference theme of “the quest for legitimacy” by examining the role that historically marginalized identities play in the democratic political process in the United States. All the papers on this panel use a unique dataset from the Latino Decisions Cooperative Survey that went into the field after the Presidential Election.

The papers by Barreto and Segura and Moreau and Nuño take up the question of Latinx participation in the election. Because of virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric, questions loomed as to how diverse Latinx populations would respond. Immediately after the election, pollsters speculated that up to 1/3 of self-identified Latinos supported Trump. Barreto and Segura argue against these initial polling results to insist that the “group threat” posed by Trump mobilized Latinxs to vote against him. In contrast to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, he made explicit overtures to the LGBTQ community. Investigating the political participation of queer Latinx voters, Moreau and Nuño undertake an intersectional analysis of the survey data to understand how contradictory messages of exclusion and inclusion influenced the form and amount of LGBTQ Latinx political participation.

Urban-rural divides also featured in initial analysis of the election results. Frasure-Yokley explores the electoral preferences of suburban voters. Moving beyond a simple city/suburb distinction, Frasure-Yokley discusses that racialized nature of different forms of suburban housing to understand how his influences the civic participation of racial minorities. The November election was also characterized as “emotionally charged” by many commentators. Exploring the role of emotions in voting behavior, Phoenix argues that it is imperative to examine how race influences the relationship between emotions and voting behavior.

These papers advance knowledge about the nature of identity politics in US politics. We examine data collected on a diverse range of voters to investigate the role of race working within the electoral system in the US. This set of papers promises to be an important contribution to current scholarly debates in voting behavior and political participation and advance policy proposals to address these issues. Each participant in the panel is also a member of the cooperative survey.

Participants:
Stephen A. Nuno (Chair)
Valerie J. Martinez-Ebers, University of North Texas (Discussant)

 

Papers:
From Prop 187 to Trump: New Evidence that Group Threat Mobilizes Latino Voters
Matt A. Barreto, University of California, Los Angeles (Author)
Gary M. Segura, Stanford University (Author)

Intersectionality and LGBTQ Latinx Voters in the 2016 Presidential Election
Julie Moreau, Washington University in St. Louis (Author)
Stephen A. Nuno, (Author)

Race and Emotion in Political Participation in the 2016 Presidential Election
Davin Lanier Phoenix, University of California, Irvine (Author)

Neighborhood Satisfaction and Political Participation in American Suburbs
Lorrie Frasure-Yokley (Author)

 

Information and Legitimacy: Results from the first EGAP Metaketa

Does a more informed electorate foster greater political accountability, and can the provision of information thereby increase the legitimacy of elected representatives? In this roundtable, we present and discuss results from the inaugural Metaketa of the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) group, a novel initiative that sponsored a series of seven harmonized field experimental studies in six countries. In contrast to a synthetic standalone paper that will present meta-analysis of overall results from these studies at APSA 2017, the focus of this roundtable is on variation in results across contexts and interventions. Participants comprised of project teams on the Metaketa will share and debate the outcome of this first-of-its-kind approach to the challenge of cumulative learning from experimental research. The discussion will be based on a forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press.

Participants:
Thad Dunning, University of California, Berkeley (Chair)
F. Daniel Hidalgo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Presenter)
Melina Raquel Platas Izama, NYU Abu Dhabi (Presenter)
Horacio Alejandro Larreguy, Harvard University (Presenter)
Neelanjan Sircar, University of Pennsylvania (Presenter)
Eric J. Kramon, George Washington University (Presenter)
Mark Buntaine, University of California, Santa Barbara (Presenter)
Malte Lierl, Yale University (Presenter)

 

Legitimate Authority in Conflict-Ridden States

For many conflict-ridden societies, a central challenge is that the state is not seen as legitimate among the very citizens it is meant to rule, and there is a lack of trust and confidence in the state as ‘the only authority in town.’ Indeed, the state itself may, by some, be seen as responsible for the war in the first place, state agents may have been committing atrocities against civilians, and other sources of authority, to whom citizens turn for their everyday strategies of survival, may be emerging in its place. The logic of the security dilemma tells us that in the absence of a legitimate state authority, we are likely to spirals of violence as groups and individuals within the state (think they) have to fend for themselves—which is a challenge that may persist long after the war comes to an end, particularly where it leads to simmering secessionist conflicts. Thus, the (re)establishment of rule of law and state authority is, in the policy community, seen as a central priority in the post-war era.

This panel brings together four papers that conceptualize, theorize, and empirically assess what legitimate state authority means, how it relates to the legitimacy of other agents of authority in society, how it shapes both war-time and post-war dynamics, and how legitimacy shapes outcomes. Indeed, as Cunningham and McWeeney discuss in the first paper on this panel, despite ‘legitimacy’ being central to our understanding of conflict dynamics (and politics in general), there is little consensus among scholars in the field on how to conceptualize and measure it.

The papers draw on a wealth of original empirical material–including process tracing from fieldwork-based case studies, cross-country analyses, and individual-level survey data–from conflict settings in different parts of the world. In the panel’s second paper, Dyrstad, Bakke, and Binningsbø draw on new survey data from Guatemala, Nepal, and Northern Ireland to examine how citizens’ perceptions of peace agreements–the very blueprints for (re)building the state and correcting the “wrongs” of the war–are likely to shape their views of the state in the post-war period. Indeed, to the degree that citizens think that the peace agreement has not been implemented, they are unlikely to have much faith in the state’s authority. In the panel’s third paper, Milli Lake hones in on the security sector. Indeed, the capacity and professionalization of state security services is seen as necessary to (re)establish the state’s monopoly on violence in the transition to a stable peace–and it is, as such, a central donor priority in conflict-ridden states. Yet, based on in-depth research from DR Congo, Chad, CAR, Niger and South Sudan, Lake shows that, in the absence of changed perceptions of the role of the police among police themselves and the populations they are meant to protect, reform efforts may rather result in the increased capacity of police to act as sources of insecurity, rather than security.

The fourth paper looks at how international perceptions of the legitimacy of claims to self-determination shapes the outcomes of separatist conflict. In convincing outsiders that international order and justice requires secession from a parent state, separatists face formidable status quo bias in international society. Seymour argues that contemporary separatists face the challenge of reconciling strategies premised on coercion and legitimation, eroding state authority domestically and internationally as they pursue their aims.

Participants:
Govinda Clayton, University of Kent (Chair)
Bridget Coggins, University of California, Santa Barbara (Discussant)
Megan A. Stewart, University of Virginia (Discussant)

Papers:
Legitimacy in Conflict Processes
Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, University of Maryland, College Park (Author)
Peggy McWeeney, University of Maryland, College Park (Non-Presenting Co-Author)

Peace Agreements and State Authority: Guatemala, Nepal, and Northern Ireland
Kristin Marie Bakke, University College London (Author)
Karin Dyrstad, SINTEF Techonology and society (Non-Presenting Co-Author)
Helga Malmin Binningsbo, Peace Research Institute Oslo (Non-Presenting Co-Author)

(In)Security and the State: The Police as Solutions to and Sources of Violence
Milli Lake, Arizona State University (Author)

Pathways to Secession: Legitimation, Coercion, and Self-Determination
Lee Seymour, Leiden University (Author)

Legitimate People, Legitimate Territory? Critical Perspectives on Sovereigntism

The legitimacy of sovereign communities and their right to take unilateral decisions on their civic boundaries (political membership, citizenship) and territorial borders is increasingly put into question in contemporary political theory. This panel assembles analyses of crucial political controversies that are often framed from a ‘sovereigntist’ perspective – irregular migration, land grabbing, and investor citizenship – to highlight the limits of this dogma of democratic sovereignty and to discuss alternative approaches to both membership and territorial politics.

The contribution of this panel to contemporary debates in political theory is threefold. First, the panel questions the sovereigntist dogma in membership politics and territorial politics from four distinct and innovative theoretical perspectives. Each contribution focuses on a specific instance of sovereign politics and shows how it fails to provide legitimacy. By revealing how irregular migration, land grabbing, citizenship duties and investor citizenship are commonly framed, the papers highlight the ambivalent potential of sovereign politics. Although the papers agree that self-governed political communities have democratic value, they show how the sovereigntist dogma leads to exclusion, marginalization, and deprivation.

Second, going beyond this critical perspective, the panel provides alternatives to sovereign politics by discussing the potential of cosmopolitan framings. When it comes to questions of migration, citizenship, or territorial borders, states and democratic communities are increasingly under pressure to justify their decisions to non-members and the international community. However, the contributions do not defend an unquestioned ideal of global cosmopolitanism. Instead, they invoke a ‘critical cosmopolitan’ perspective to shed light on the specific political controversies at hand: How could a “No border” approach be justified? How can territorial self-determination be theorized without invoking the problematic notion of sovereignty? What could cosmopolitan membership politics entail – who has to be included in non-sovereign boundary-making?

Third, the panel is a contribution to the emerging methodological debate on International Political Theory. By combining topics such as migration, citizenship and territory, it questions the givenness of national boundaries and borders – thus going beyond what has been criticized as ‘methodological nationalism’. In addition, the contributions make room for participatory politics from below and question the idea of theoretical blueprints. Instead of discussing methodological questions separately, however, the papers contribute to this methodological debate by exemplifying four versions of Critical International Political Theory ‘in action’.

Participants:
Rainer Baubock, European University Institute (Discussant)
Claudio Lopez-Guerra, Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (Discussant)
Cristina Lafont, Northwestern University (Chair)

Papers:
Beyond Sovereign Boundary-making: Cosmopolitan Citizenship Politics
Svenja Ahlhaus, University of Hamburg (Author)

From Closed Borders to No Borders: “the Problem” of Irregular Migration
Anne McNevin, The New School (Author)

Land Grabbing and the Contradictions of Sovereign Territoriality
Anna Jurkevics, Yale University (Author)

Why Place Matters: Place-Specific Duties and Citizenship Rights
Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Haverford College (Author)

 

Legitimizing Post-Conflict States: Empirical and Theoretical Microfoundations

An emerging consensus holds that a key determinant of peacebuilding success is the ability of international actors to create domestic institutions perceived by local populations as legitimate. The legitimacy of state institutions, which allows post-conflict states to collect taxes and enforce the rule of law in spite of low capacity, provides the foundation for long-lasting peace. Yet, political science still lacks a systematic understanding of how international peacebuilders can successfully craft legitimate institutions in post-conflict states.

This panel presents research that offers new theoretical micro-foundations for understanding the process by which peacebuilders can lend legitimacy to post-conflict states. The papers emphasize how international actors increase the legitimacy of the state by helping it provide public goods and establish order as a credible signal that the state is fulfilling its end of the social contract. They show how peacebuilders can help build order either directly, through policing and defense patrols, or indirectly, through support of local institutions. The authors also highlight the centrality of information in building legitimacy for institutions among local populations. Indeed, publics may otherwise be unaware that internationally supported reforms that improve governance are taking place.

The papers offer a diverse array of qualitative, quantitative, and experimental methodological tools designed to understand the peacebuilding legitimization process from a variety of political science perspectives. Some authors present findings from ethnographic engagement with their field sites, drawing on rich qualitative work and interviews with key policy-makers in conflict settings. Other panel participants use experimental data produced by recent fieldwork. Additionally, the panel also offers quantitative analyses that use novel datasets to identify the causal effect of peacekeeper deployments on peaceful outcomes. The papers also draw upon deep exploration of conflict and post-conflict zones across the globe. Conflicts examined in depth include Mali, Liberia, and the Central African Republic, providing variation in peacebuilding strategies as well as institutional design, capacity, and legitimacy.

The overarching aim of the panel is to expand the frontier of research on the role of peacebuilders in crafting legitimate states both methodologically and theoretically. Specifically, the authors seek to collectively further our understanding of the dynamics that underlie successful peacebuilding. Their studies suggest that, notable successes aside, much work remains for international actors hoping to build legitimate domestic institutions in post-conflict states.

Participants:
Aila M. Matanock, University of California-Berkeley (Chair)
David A. Lake, University of California, San Diego (Discussant)
Eric Stollenwerk, Freie Universitaet Berlin (Discussant)

Papers:
Local Peace, International Builders: Localized Peace Enforcement after Conflict
William G. Nomikos, Yale University (Author)

The Means of Power in UN Peacekeeping
Lise Morje Howard, Georgetown University (Author)

The Role of Exposure and Information in Post-Conflict Governance
Sabrina Karim (Author)

Estimating a Causal Effect of UN Peacekeeping on Local Security
Bernd Beber, New York University (Author)

Migration and Border Politics in Africa

This panel explores emerging re-conceptualizations of state legitimacy, citizenship, and nation-building in Africa by focusing on the implications of migration and border politics. These papers employ diverse methodologies including geo-coded survey experiments, interviews and focus groups, and extensive original cross-national data collection. Together, these papers offer new insights to the rich literature on political membership and boundary-making in Africa while also building a comparative reference to current immigration debates in Europe and the US by highlighting South-South migration, an often overlooked dynamic in migration studies.

First, Abhit Bhandari and Lisa Mueller propose a theory of familial nationalism to explain how nationalism can persist in border regions where the state is virtually absent. They exploit a recent decision by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which reconfigures the colonially drawn border between Burkina Faso and Niger and allows citizens in the affected regions the rare opportunity to choose their citizenship.

Second, Yang-Yang Zhou examines how forced migration, specifically the settlement of refugees, can heighten local citizens’ attachment to their national identity while weakening their attachment to ethnic and other subnational identities. She employs an original geo-coded survey experiment of citizens living in a Tanzanian border region near a rapidly expanding refugee camp.

Next, Loren Landau investigates how migration, domestic and international, is rapidly transforming Africa’s urban centers. Using Maputo, Johannesburg, and Nairobi as examples, he investigates under what conditions migrant integration and citizenship are broadened (or narrowed), especially in the absence of strong state institutions and cultural norms.

Finally, Elizabeth Wellman examines why African governments include or exclude emigrant citizens in elections by highlighting the strategic role of political parties. She introduces an original dataset of African countries that accounts for variation of diaspora voting adoption and implementation from 1990-2015.

Participants:
Claire Leslie Adida, UCSD (Chair)
Amanda Lea Robinson, The Ohio State University (Discussant)

Papers:
Familial Nationalism in Weak African States
Abhit Bhandari, Columbia University (Author)
Lisa Mueller, Macalester College (Author)

How Refugees Shape National Boundaries by Challenging Them
Yang-Yang Zhou, Princeton University (Author)

Mobility, Space and Scales: Participation and Citizenship in Cities that Move
Loren B Landau, University of the Witwatersrand (Author)

Does Citizenship Travel? Diaspora Voting in Africa
Elizabeth Wellman, Yale University (Author)

 

Muslim American Identity and Political Behavior

Political science has been slow to study the political behavior of Muslim Americans, a demographic group that has been increasingly prominent in American politics. The four papers on this panel take steps to address this limitation. Using a range of methodological approaches, their authors examine processes of Muslim American identity formation, mobilization, and participation in elections and other political activities. Their individual findings, and the dialogue the panel will facilitate among them, will contribute to the burgeoning research literature on Muslim American politics.

Participants:
Melissa R. Michelson, Menlo College (Chair)
Shamira M. Gelbman, Wabash College (Discussant)
Rina Verma Williams, University of Cincinnati (Discussant)

Papers:
Trumping the Trump Effect: Social Identity Cues and Anti-Muslim Rhetoric
Brian R. Calfano, University of Cincinnati (Author)

Muslim Americans and the 2016 Elections
Emily Cury, Northeastern University (Author)

Belonging, Identity and the Immigrant-Indigenous Divide among American Muslims
Ahmet Selim Tekelioglu, Boston University (Author)

Gender and Political Behavior among Muslim Americans
Aubrey Westfall, Virginia Wesleyan College (Author)
Bozena Christina Welborne, Smith College (Author)
Ozge Celik Russell, Gazi University (Author)
Sarah Tobin, Brown University (Author)

 

Muslims in the American Imagination

Negative portrayals of Muslims have been on the rise in the United States in recent years, and reached a fever pitch in the 2016 election. The papers on this panel investigate these developments, focusing especially on interactions between media and other elite depictions on the one hand, and popular conceptions of Muslims on the other. Both individually and together, these studies contribute substantially to research on Muslim American politics, media effects, and American politics in comparative perspective.

Participants:
Brian R. Calfano, University of Cincinnati (Chair)
Emily Cury, (Discussant)
Aubrey Westfall, Virginia Wesleyan College (Discussant)

 Papers:
Tolerance Uncovered: How Frequency of News Exposure Affects Tolerance of Groups
Anwar Hijaz-Schreim, University of California, Riverside (Author)

The “Others”: The Dehumanization and Political Isolation of Muslim Americans
Nazita Lajevardi, UCSD (Author)

Real and Imagined Muslims in India and America
Laura Dudley Jenkins, University of Cincinnati (Author)

Muslim American Isolation: Anxiety, Fear, and Segregation
Kassra AR Oskooii, University of Delaware (Author)
Nazita Lajevardi, UCSD (Non-Presenting Co-Author)

Perspectives on Trumpism

Participants:
Larry M. Bartels, Vanderbilt University (Chair)
Larry M. Bartels, Vanderbilt University (Discussant)
Jennifer L. Hochschild, Harvard University (Discussant)

 

Papers:
How Trump Won: Identity and Immigration in the 2016 Presidential Election
John M. Sides, George Washington University (Author)
Michael Tesler, UC Irvine (Author)
Lynn Vavreck, University of California, Los Angeles (Author)

Emotions, Identities, and Preferences: The Politics of Right-Leaning Populism
Wendy M. Rahn, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (Author)
Marc J. Hetherington, Vanderbilt University (Author)

Assessing the Political Distinctiveness of White Millennials: How Race and Generation Shape Racial and Political Attitudes in a Changing America
Deborah Schildkraut, Tufts University (Author)

When Populists Get What They Want: Trump Supporters’ Interpretations of the Initial Months of the Trump Administration
Katherine J Cramer, University of Wisconsin, Madison (Author)

Political Competition, Religious Authority, and Orthodoxy in Muslim World

Scholarship on the relationship between politics and religion has oscillated between 1) essentialism where religious doctrine and orthodoxy is regarded as constant and capable of explaining a wide array of political, social, and economic outcomes and 2) rationalism where religious discourse and orthodoxy are either entirely ignored or valued predominantly for purely instrumental utility. Challenging both traditions, this panel takes religion more seriously and focuses on how religious orthodoxy and religious authority are constructed and vary over time. Critically, the panel explores the ways political competition over religious authority and orthodoxy can define the forms that religious discourse can take within the Muslim world. More specifically, the panel analyzes 1) how cooptation of Islamic religious orthodoxy has enabled state elite to minimize pluralism and reinforce authoritarian forms of government, 2) the mechanisms through which Muslim clerics try to establish their individual credentials, 3) the means that various political actors leverage state religious agency and its religious authority to affect societal outcomes, and 4) the significance of religion and religious authority in building popular support for Islamist parties. The panel is a significant effort to theorize about the role of religious discourse, orthodoxy, and authority in political analysis by relying on original quantitative and qualitative data. In particular, panelists underscore political competition as the primary dynamic that allows variation in religious discourse across time and space.

Participants:
Marc Lynch, George Washington University (Chair)
Michael Driessen, John Cabot University (Discussant)

Papers:
Islamic Authority in the Internet Age
Richard Nielsen, MIT (Author)

Does Doctrine Matter? Analyzing Shifts in Official Islam through Friday Sermons
Kristin E. Fabbe, Harvard Business School (Author)
Avital Livny, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Author)
A.Kadir Yildirim, Rice University (Author)

Religious Authority and Islamist Popularity: Survey Experiment Evidence
A.Kadir Yildirim, Rice University (Author)

 

Populism, Immigration, Race, and LGBT Rights in the U.S. and Europe

Brexit, the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the issues surrounding the French 2017 election indicate that there are similar issues driving electoral behavior in the U.S. and Europe. Race, immigration (including immigrant integration), expanded LGBT rights as well as concerns about globalization seem to be driving support for populist right politicians. In this context, it is critical for political science that we work across sub-disciplinary divides. In order to understand the developing trends it will be important for Americanists, comparativists, theorists and IR specialists to work together and share approaches that can help us understand the broader complexity that is driving electoral behavior. The papers on this panel will examine the topics that are helping to drive the support for Brexit and politicians like Marine Le Pen in France and Donald Trump in the U.S. Populist politicans are calling into question the legitimacy of mainstream politicians who they say are failing at integrating immigrants, and are no longer supporting the interests of middle-class and working-class voters. The aspirations of voters are driving them to abandon mainstream politicians, but it is not clear that these politicians can meet their expectations.

Participants:
Terri E Givens, Menlo College (Chair)
Dianne M. Pinderhughes, University of Notre Dame (Discussant)
Christopher S. Parker, University of Washington (Discussant)

Papers:
The Perils of Benchmarking Immigrant Integration to ‘Mainstream’ Society
Rahsaan Maxwell, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Author)
Laurence Lessard-Phillips, University of Birmingham (Author)

When Rights are Unpopular: LGBT Realities in a Right-Wing Populist World
Melissa R. Michelson, Menlo College (Author)
Brian F. Harrison, Northwestern University (Author)

Race and Democracy: After 2016
Utz Lars McKnight, University of Alabama (Author)

Roots of the Radical Right: Perceived Deprivation in the US and Britain
Justin Gest, George Mason University (Author)

 

Quest for Legitimacy: Understanding Threat, Fear, and Political Exclusion

This panel brings together papers looking at how threat affects votes and attitudes. In some cases, the perceived threat is from people moving into an area. In other cases, the perceived threat is from people already in the neighborhood. These papers examine this topic using election data from the United States and Europe.

Participants:
Amy Erica Smith,Iowa State University (Discussant)
Ryan D. Enos, Harvard University (Discussant)
Alexa Bankert, University of Georgia (Chair)

 Papers:
Authoritarianism, Social Threat, and Support for Donald Trump
Stanley Feldman, Brook University (Author)
Howard Lavine, University of Minnesota (Author)
Yamil Velez, Wesleyan University (Author)

Locking Up The Vote: Household Spillover Effects of Incarceration
Ariel Rebecca White, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Author)

The Role of History and Family Experience in Shaping Xenophobic Attitudes
Vasiliki Fouka, Stanford University (Author)
Elias Dinas, University of Oxford (Non-Presenting Co-Author)

Unwelcoming Neighbors: Refugee Resettlement, Racial Threat, and Voting
Bryan Wilcox-Archuleta, UCLA (Author)
Tyler Thomas Reny, University of California Los Angeles (Author)
Gaurav Sood, Independent (Author)

 

Race, Gender, Sexuality & the Politics of Legitimacy: 8 Months in Trumplandia

Scholars reflect upon the politics of legitimacy and marginalized groups in the wake of Barack Obama’s Presidency, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, and eight months into the Trump Presidency.

Scholars reflect upon the politics of legitimacy and marginalized groups in the wake of Barack Obama’s Presidency, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, and eight months into the Trump Presidency.

Participants:
Dara Z. Strolovitch, Princeton University (Chair)
Marisa Abrajano (Presenter)
Lisa Garcia Bedolla, University of California, Berkeley (Presenter)
Cathy J. Cohen, University of Chicago (Presenter)
Amaney Jamal, Princeton University (Presenter)
Sheryl R. Lightfoot, University of British Columbia (Presenter)

Reconstructing Legitimacy: Approaches to Post-Conflict Reconciliation

In the wake of conflict, genocide and human rights abuses, states and their citizens must decide how to address the crimes of the past and rebuild political and civic legitimacy. The states examined in this panel have employed highly varied methods for moving on after conflict and consequently offer a wide-ranging look at why governments select specific reconciliation strategies over others and the extent to which these efforts are accepted as legitimate. Dr. Jessica Mecellem’s paper focuses on the narrative that the Algerian government has constructed about the Algerian civil war. Drawing on primary sources published in multiple languages, she analyzes how the Algerian regime has attempted to cement its political legitimacy by adopting increasingly lenient attitudes towards wartime perpetrators. By using content analysis to document the Algerian government’s progression from imprisoning perpetrators to amnestying perpetrators and, ultimately, disregarding the rule of law, Dr. Mecellem provides insight into how undemocratic regimes seek legitimacy by gradually replacing legal post-conflict reconciliation tactics with illegal ones. The extralegal methods that Algeria has used to acquire legitimacy in a postwar context contrast greatly with the highly legalistic reconciliation approach described by Hubert Leber in his paper on the post-Holocaust interactions between West Germany and Israel. Mr. Leber uses primary sources and content analysis to assess a particularly fraught episode in West German/Israeli relations; namely, the debate of the late 1970s about how to react to the impending deadline for prosecuting Nazi criminals as set by West Germany’s statute of limitations. This approaching deadline threatened the legitimacy of West German/Israeli reconciliation, and it revealed fundamental differences in attitude between both countries when it came to dealing with the legacy of the Holocaust. By analyzing the West German and Israeli responses – on the executive, diplomatic, and parliamentary levels –, Mr. Leber shows how the need to maintain international standing and moral authority caused a crucial modification in the West German legal system concerning the treatment of the Nazi past. Dr. Kathy Powers also takes an international lens through which to view post-conflict reconciliation efforts, focusing on governmental reparations payments for human rights abuses. Her paper demonstrates and discusses the evolution of the politics of global reparations for mass human rights violations and suggests a reexamination of the discipline’s approach to conceptualizing reparations. By crafting a theoretically and methodologically sound foundation for reparations scholarship, Dr. Powers offers a carefully considered investigation into the changing global norms around human rights and the increasing importance of reparations as a means of establishing legitimacy both with victims of human rights abuses and in the eyes of the international community. Her paper discusses how changing accountability norms require governments to address human rights violations in new ways in order to maintain internal and external legitimacy, and how the complex dynamics of reparations payments can be better understood in light of these normative shifts. Claire Greenstein also looks at the phenomenon of reparations in her paper, and, like Dr. Powers, she argues for a more nuanced approach to analyzing reparations. In her paper, she takes a closer look at the variation in reparations payments and non-payments that remains unexamined in current binary quantitative analyses of reparations. Using an original dataset, Ms. Greenstein assesses the patterns in governments’ reparations payments and non-payments for nine distinct types of state-sanctioned human rights abuses committed in Latin America and Europe between 1939 and 2006. She then constructs a theoretical framework to explain why these patterns exist, utilizing case studies to show how changing international attitudes towards gender equality and minority rights have elevated the legitimacy of reparations payments, altered perceptions around what types of victims’ claims are seen as legitimate, and changed the incidence of reparations payments for specific violations. Ultimately, this panel provides a look at the myriad of ways in which governments seek to overcome legacies of conflict and reestablish legitimacy by examining a diverse spectrum of countries, time periods, post-conflict contexts, and approaches to reconciliation.

Participants:
Milada Anna Vachudova, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Chair)
Jelena Subotic, Georgia State University (Discussant)

Papers:
Limited Contrition: Explaining Systematic Variation in Reparations Payments
Claire Greenstein, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Author)

German-Israeli Relations and the Statute of Limitations for Nazi Crimes
Hubert Leber, Philipps University of Marburg (Germany) / University of Haifa (Israel) (Author)

Misfortune or Injustice? The Political Work of Algeria’s Post Conflict Narrative
Jessica Mecellem, Loyola University Chicago (Author)

Reparations in International Relations: Evolving Function, Mechanisms and Venues
Kathy L. Powers, University of New Mexico (Author)


Revitalizing Legitimacy: Integrating Concepts, Measurement, and Analysis

The legitimacy of authorities and institutions is a foundational concern in political science and the social sciences generally. While political theorists have developed insights about the normative foundations of legitimacy for centuries, an operationally crisp implementation of the concept as an empirical phenomenon has proved surprisingly elusive. The purpose of this roundtable is to frame a research agenda for the scientifically rigorous study of the sources and consequences of legitimate authority. Particular attention will be given to the problem of measurement and the difficulty of distinguishing the legitimating effects of institutions and leaders’ choices on citizens’ evaluations and behaviors from differences in outcomes arising due to material incentives. Drawing on their different backgrounds, the panelists will discuss competing conceptions of legitimacy, the theoretical mechanisms linking legitimacy to citizen behavior, and challenges of measurement and research design that make testing these theoretical accounts both difficult and exciting.

Participants:
Eric Dickson, New York University (Presenter)
Sanford C. Gordon, New York University (Presenter)
Gregory Huber, Yale University (Chair)
Leonie Huddy, SUNY, Stony Brook (Presenter)
Macartan Humphreys, Columbia University (Presenter)
Margaret Levi, Stanford University (Presenter)

Role of Legitimacy in Counterinsurgency

Is counterinsurgency a contest over legitimacy? The classical literature on counterinsurgency argues effective counterinsurgency to be an exercise in achieving legitimacy. From colonial counterinsurgency experiences to US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, scholars and practitioners have regularly made the case that success of military campaigns is tied to implementation of “hearts and minds” strategies. But the practice of counterinsurgency – historically and in recent times – challenges this view. Many counterinsurgents around the world have circumvented the quest for legitimacy, rhetoric notwithstanding. This trend is strongly reflected in an observation by Stathis Kalyvas, saying “the theoretical “primacy of the political” has proved elusive in most cases; winning “hearts and minds”.. takes the back seat to the application of violence… In some cases, the “correct” application of violence proves enough to defeat the insurgency and consolidate state control.”

The salience of counterinsurgency to theory and policy necessitates that the tension in the relationship between legitimacy and counterinsurgency be probed further. To that end, the panel brings together scholars studying historical and contemporary counterinsurgency campaigns to dwell on the role of legitimacy in counterinsurgency, if any, and its implications.

Our chair and discussant is Professor James Fearon. He is scholar of interstate war, civil war, insurgency, and political violence, and has also published on democratic theory, post-conflict aid, and international relations theory. He will offer incisive feedback on the papers as well as on the state of the field, unresolved issues, and how the papers contribute to the debates on counterinsurgency.

The presenters on the panel include Evgeny Finkel, Terry Peterson, Austin Wright, and Asfandyar Mir.

Evgeny Finkel’s paper studies the dyadic relationship between repression and dissent by focusing on ongoing violence in Israel/Palestine, specifically in the Jerusalem area. His paper employs a mixed-method approach that combines statistical analysis of incident data with in-depth qualitative process tracing and interviews. The paper explores how the Israeli government and the Palestinian actors challenging the state choose their violent tactics and how those tactics change in response to the other side’s actions.

Terry Peterson project draws on deep archival work to study the Algerian War, which has played a critical role in forming the ideas on modern counterinsurgency. He shows that the French military commanders’ framing of the conflict as a contest for legitimacy flattens the complexity of French counterinsurgency practices and their evolution between 1954 and 1962. He finds that French commanders often privileged coercive strategies that rendered civilian populations tractable over efforts to build goodwill, arguing that the disconnect between the French Army’s coercive practices and its public language of legitimacy-building played a significant role in building widespread resentment against continued French rule.

Austin Wright’s paper theorizes how provision of aid to civilian reduces rebel violence. The papers tests the theory using novel declassified data on coalition-led development projects, and insurgent and counterinsurgent activities in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2014. The paper empirically disaggregates the effects of varying types of aid, like infrastructure reconstruction programs, programs involving community leaders among other types, on directs measures of collaboration, like quality and tactical value of intelligence shared by civilians.

Last, Asfandyar Mir’s paper analyzes the effects of drone warfare on targeted organizations. Studying the US drone program in Pakistan, the paper relies on fieldwork in Pakistan’s North West, involving interviews with members of Al-Qaeda and Pakistan. He shows that the drone program led to shifts in the targeted organization’s strategic trajectories, managerial challenges like foot soldier level desertions, and political challenges like organizational fragmentation.

These papers are at the cutting edge of research on counterinsurgency. The research strategies used to evaluate these outcomes span the methodological breadth of political science, including statistical analysis, field research with interviews, and archival research.

Participants:
James D. Fearon, Stanford University (Chair)
James D. Fearon, Stanford University (Discussant)

Papers:
Tactics of Repression and Dissent in Jerusalem
Evgeny Finkel, George Washington University (Author)
Yonatan Lupu, George Washington University (Non-Presenting Co-Author)
Dan Miodownik, Hebrew University (Non-Presenting Co-Author)

Legitimacy and Coercion in French Counterinsurgency during the Algerian War
Terrence G Peterson, Florida International University (Author)

Development Aid, Non-Combatants, and Civil Conflict
Austin Wright, University of Chicago (Author)

Insurgent Trajectories under Repression: Evidence from US Drone Program
Asfandyar Ali Mir, University of Chicago (Author)

The “Legitimate Authority of the People” in American Political Thought

The word “legitimacy” rises to prominence after America’s constitutional founding era, but the concept or something quite like it is there, and it is debated by leading minds. Those debates can illuminate what seems to be a crisis of legitimacy in the liberal democracies of the 21st century, to include America’s current moment of turbulence. The word legitimacy does not appear in The Federalist Papers, but the phrase “legitimate authority” occurs several times, in papers by both Hamilton and Madison, principally in relation to the American people, who are called its source or fountain. Looking at various sources, spanning the Founding era to ante-bellum debates and our current polarization, and taking different approaches, the four papers on this panel will explore the grounding of legitimacy in the people over the course of American political time.

The paper by John Zumbrunnen, “’Founded in Opinion’: Benjamin Franklin and David Hume on Legitimacy,” explores the much-neglected friendship of Franklin and Hume as a heuristic for understanding Franklin’s thought on the role of public opinion as foundational in government. Looking at central moments in Franklin’s political career, from his Albany Plan to the Philadelphia Convention, Zumbrunnen plans to show how Franklin’s speeches and deeds are shaped by the ideas in Hume’s Essays.

Michael Zuckert, Zachary German, and Robert Burton trace the evolution of the Electoral College and the changing mediatory role of political parties in their paper, “’The Aim of Every Political Constitution’: The Founders and the Election of Trump.” Correcting misunderstandings about the original purpose of the electoral system and discussing its development over the course of American political history, they analyze the breakdown of the traditional deliberative role of parties in the election of 2016, particularly as it led to the election of a president who, to understate the matter, does not seem to fit the mold envisioned by the Founders or encouraged by the parties.

David Corey’s essay, “The Paradox of Rule and the Problem of Legitimacy in American Politics,” is focused on the challenge to legitimacy in our present, individualistic age. Under what circumstances, he asks, can Americans who are focused on their rights accept rule by political majorities as legitimate, particularly by majorities with whom they share few opinions and beliefs? His tentative solution looks pragmatically at the possibilities of decentralization, relying on markets and a practice of restraint.

Robinson Woodward-Burns argues in “Emerson on Self-Reliance, Slavery, and Constitutional Reform” that we have tended to overlook a call to populist direct action in the transcendentalist’s political thought, one that illuminates continuing debates about legal versus popular conceptions of legitimacy. Woodward-Burns explores Emerson’s antislavery and political writings that call Northern individuals to enact self-reliance by forming mobs to rescue and hide fugitive slaves – thereby nullifying the Constitution’s proslavery provisions (such as the Fugitive Slave Clause) and proslavery legislation (the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act). Emerson later supported military force as the only path to restoring legitimate self-reliance against an irredeemably proslavery Constitution, to re-found America’s original promise of popular legitimacy.

The panelists encompass a range of approaches to American political thought, and the framing of the issues of legitimacy among the papers spans the founding era to the present moment. This should make for an illuminating and lively discussion among the authors and discussants, as well as with the audience.

The chair and two discussants will ably cover this range of topics and approaches. The panel chair will be Christine Dunn Henderson, an expert in Anglo-American literary and political thought and foundational issues of American political thought. Commenting will be Robert Saldin, who has published on the presidency and on American political development; and Susan McWilliams, a democratic theorist who works on contemporary issues and concerns.

Participants:
Christine Dunn Henderson, Liberty Fund (Chair)
Robert P. Saldin, University of Montana (Discussant)
James M. Patterson, Ava Maria University (Discussant)

Papers:
“Founded in Opinion:” Benjamin Franklin and David Hume on Legitimacy
John Zumbrunnen, University of Wisconsin, Madison (Author)

The Aim of Every Political Constitution: The Founders and the Election of Trump
Michael P. Zuckert, University of Notre Dame (Author)
Zachary German, University of Notre Dame (Author)
Robert Burton, University of Notre Dame (Author)

Emerson on Self-Reliance, Slavery, and Constitutional Reform
Robinson Woodward-Burns, University of Pennsylvania (Author)

The Paradox of Rule and the Problem of Legitimacy in American Politics
David D. Corey, Baylor University (Author)

 

The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of International NGOs

This roundtable will discuss “The Authority Trap,” a new book by Sarah Stroup and Wendy Wong that will be published by Cornell University Press in late summer 2017. The book speaks directly to the conference themes of legitimacy, actors, and audiences. Stroup and Wong offer a theory of INGO authority and a set of causal claims around the implications of variations in INGO authority. The main argument is that INGOs that have the most authority (“leading INGOs”) in global politics often pursue incrementalist strategies. This is because authority comes from a variety of audiences, including states, corporations, the general public, and other INGOs. The more audiences that defer (i.e., the more authority INGOs have), the less latitude those INGOs have to suggest radical change because they are concerned with maintaining audience deference.

Participants:
Michael N. Barnett, George Washington University (Chair)
Sarah S. Bush, George Washington University (Presenter)
Peter A. Gourevitch, University of California, San Diego (Presenter)
Kathryn Sikkink, Harvard University (Presenter)
David Vogel, University of California, Berkeley (Presenter)
Sarah S. Stroup, Middlebury College (Presenter)
Wendy Wong, University of Toronto (Presenter)

 

The Emergence of Donald Trump: Did Political Science See this Coming?

In the aftermath of November 8, 2016, the day on which Donald Trump was elected to become the 45th President of the United States, many were shocked, including most professional political scientists. Does this mean that the discipline was totally blindsided, as a recent post in the Chronicle of Higher Education argues? Or, is it more the case that existing theory is capable of explaining this stunning outcome, but the discipline failed to appreciate it in time? Finally, what does his election mean for the country, party politics, and public policy? This roundtable will consider a range of explanations on the causes, and likely consequences, of what most see as the surprising election of the erstwhile businessman.

Participants:
Christopher S. Parker, University of Washington (Chair)
Zoltan L. Hajnal, University of California, San Diego (Presenter)
Christopher M. Federico, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (Presenter)
Jane Y. Junn, University of Southern California (Presenter)
Marc J. Hetherington, Vanderbilt University (Presenter)
Katherine J Cramer, University of Wisconsin, Madison (Presenter)
Theda Skocpol, Harvard University (Presenter)
Matt A. Barreto, University of California, Los Angeles (Presenter)

 

The First 222 Days (But Who’s Counting?): Sex, Gender, Race, Class

Though we are sure that there will be many policy and voting behavior related panels concerning the new presidential administration, we aim to collect feminist political theorists to consider the ethical and philosophical significance of the policy changes that will undoubtedly unfold before the 2017 APSA convention. “The Quest for Legitimacy” is particularly relevant to feminism at this point, since the election of Donald Trump symbolized the repudiation of everything that we have worked for, stand for, and believe in. That we have been reduced suddenly and apparently from engaged actors to passive spectators should not mask our aspirations to resist and fight the retrenchment on advances for women, people of color, LGBT individuals and poor persons that are likely to occur over the next four years. But such aspirations require theorists to offer critical engagement and analysis to provide our empirical colleagues with the normative foundations on which to found their research. From locating this moment in the history of political thought with special attention to female canonical figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft, to the impact of likely abortion restrictions on the changing meaning of women’s citizenship, to the increasing significance of the intersectionality of sex, gender, race, gender and class in a variety of emerging legal issues including immigration, to the ethics of how changes in foreign aid are affecting women’s standing and power across the globe, to the future of transgender rights, a wide range of philosophical questions arise about the future of the democratic polity for feminism, how feminism must change and has changed in response to these challenges, and what ethical and theoretical challenges lay ahead for political scientists and theorists committed to feminism. Participants include Brooke Ackerly from Vanderbilt University, Eileen Hunt Botting from Notre Dame, Heath Fogg Davis from Temple University, Michaele Ferguson from the University of Colorado, Nancy J. Hirschmann from The University of Pennsylvania (co-chair), Juliet Hooker from the University of Texas, and Tamara Metz from Reed College (co-chair).

Participants:
Nancy J. Hirschmann, University of Pennsylvania (Chair)
Tamara Metz, Reed College (Presenter)
Heath Fogg Davis, Temple University (Presenter)
Juliet Hooker, University of Texas, Austin (Presenter)
Eileen Hunt Botting, University of Notre Dame (Presenter)
Brooke A. Ackerly, Vanderbilt University (Presenter)
Michaele L. Ferguson, University of Colorado, Boulder (Presenter)

The Gendered Consequences of Armed Conflict

A growing body of empirical research suggests that exposure to violence and civil war increases prosocial attitudes and behavior. However, little attention has been given to the gender-related aspects of the violence that populations experience or to the gendered consequences of this violence, which extend far beyond the conflict itself. This panel consists of four papers that place neglected actors and audiences, in particular women, front and center by focusing on the gendered consequences of armed conflict. In a quantitative cross-national study, Beardsley, Chen, and Webster examine the extent to which armed conflict upends or contributes to gender hierarchy. Koos develops a micro-level theory on the social consequences of conflict-related sexual violence and tests this theory using a large-scale survey on conflict and post-conflict behaviors in Sierra Leone. Using a mixed methods approach, Lindsey examines how previous exposure to armed conflict shapes punishment preferences for sexual and domestic violence drawing from a series of 80 focus groups in eastern DR Congo. Morgan-Collins and Theuerkauf study the long-term social and political consequences of rape by Soviet soldiers after World War II in Germany. Taken together, these contributions demonstrate how armed conflict can alter the legitimacy of social orders and actors as well as the legitimacy of behaviors such as sexual violence, domestic violence, and community participation in the post-conflict sphere.

Participants:
Ragnhild Nordaas, PRIO (Chair)
Amelia Hoover Green, Drexel University (Discussant)

 Papers:
Conflict, Peace and the Evolution of Gender Hierarchy
Kyle Beardsley, Duke University (Author)
Chong Chen, Duke University (Author)
Kaitlyn Webster, Duke University (Author)

Decay or Resilience: The Effect of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence
Carlo Koos, University of Konstanz (Author)

After Conflict: Social Norms for Punishing Sexual and Domestic Violence
Summer E. Lindsey, University (Author)

Post-War East Germany: Long-Term Consequences of Sexual Violence
Mona Morgan-Collins, University of Pennsylvania (Author)
Ulrike Gisela Theuerkauf, University of East Anglia (Author)

 

The Political Effects of Forced Migration on States

Refugees and forced migrants have been viewed from two main lenses: humanitarian vulnerability and militarized threats. But the effects of refugees on states go far beyond their potential armed role or humanitarian need, both of which have been well studied. What are the repercussions for state legitimacy and sovereignty of hosting refugees? When and how do they threaten resource provision, and can that reticulate into lessening trust of state authority and altering the framing of domestic contention? Are extreme movements in the domestic sphere empowered, and if so, when? Refugees can be used, scapegoated, and manipulated, and all these dynamics effect changes in government, and possibly state institutions. The papers on this panel deal with these un-studied but profound effects of refugees in transforming domestic politics.

 Participants:
Anne Marie Baylouny, Naval Postgraduate School (Chair)
Yang-Yang Zhou, Princeton University (Discussant)

 

Papers:
From Protection to Persecution: Determinants of State Violence against Refugees
Burcu Savun, University of Pittsburgh (Author)
Christian Gineste (Author)

Sovereignty & Scales: Recognition & the Power of Mobility in Sub-Saharan Africa
Loren B Landau, University of the Witwatersrand (Author)

Protracted Tragedy of Refugee Displacement: Why Afghans Are Leaving Pakistan
Anshu N. Chatterjee (Author)

Rejecting Scapegoats: Politics of Syrian Refugees in Neighboring Countries
Anne Marie Baylouny, Naval Postgraduate School (Author)

 

Threatening the Legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court Nomination Process

The process to fill Justice Antonin Scalia’s U.S. Supreme Court seat has raised the question about whether the Supreme Court nomination process is legitimate. Many Americans question whether a president should fill a vacancy in a presidential election year and many senators urge the president to forego an appointment. The U.S. Senate failed to carry out the traditional process to confirm or reject a nominee. A U.S. senator threatened to block a potential new president’s Supreme Court appointees throughout her term. The legitimacy of the process is in question in an era of federal government gridlock and intense partisanship.

This roundtable will explore how the Supreme Court nomination process reached its current crisis point, what factors contribute to the questions about its legitimacy, and what reforms may be necessary to restore the legitimacy of the process today. Participants will be scholars who study the evolution and function of today’s Supreme Court nomination process.

Participants:
Richard Davis, Brigham Young University (Chair)
John A. Maltese (Presenter)
Lee Epstein, Washington University in St. Louis (Presenter)
Lori A. Ringhand, University of Georgia (Presenter)
Christine L. Nemacheck, College of William & Mary (Presenter)
Paul M. Collins, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Presenter)

 

Where to with the Liberal Order?

Now where to in the Global Order? And what are the role and actions of the United States in the face of rising nationalism? The challenge by Trump, but by ‘Democrat’ Bernie Sanders as well, challenged US leadership in the Liberal Order. The anti-globalist rhetoric – the attack on trade, alliance politics and US leadership generally in the rhetoric of ‘America First’, rhetorically left the Liberal Order in tatters.

What is the future of the Liberal Order now in a Trump Presidency with a rising tide of populism and illiberal democracy. In particular, if the US retreats from global leadership, undermines the post war alliances and multilateral trade trade regimes, what is the replacement, and what must the US do?

Participants:
Alan S. Alexandroff, University of Toronto (Chair)
Judith Lynn Goldstein, Stanford University (Presenter)
Stephen D. Krasner, Stanford University (Presenter)
Martha Finnemore, George Washington University (Presenter)
Arthur A. Stein, UCLA (Presenter)
Miles Kahler, American University (Presenter)
Stephen M. Walt, Harvard University (Presenter)
Etel L. Solingen, University of California Irvine (Presenter)