Suchergebnisse

When do personal ties matter? Studies of political elite's rise to power stress the importance of personal ties, but do not consider the possibility of differential effects depending on who one is connected to in elite struggles. We examine how ties formed among Chinese party-state officials influence their career. Our research design provides a strong proxy to account for personal ties: attendance of an exclusive and intensive training program for officials. We take advantage of the exogenous assignment to cohorts in this program to establish a causal link between informal connections and promotions. We find that the effect of personal ties depends on whether the official is connected to the leader who dominates the promotion process or to the one who only influences it through information control. Connections to the latter decrease the promotion probability, likely because these officials are closely monitored by their superiors and more powerful rivals.

How is political violence gendered? We connect the traditional political violence literature's emphasis on categorizing attacks to the gender and politics literature's analysis of the barriers to women's political participation. Our framework separates gendered political violence into three elements. Gendered motives appear when perpetrators use violence to preserve hegemonic men's control of politics. Gendered forms emphasize how gender roles and tropes differentially shape men's and women's experiences of violence. Gendered impacts capture the subjective meaning-making processes that occur as different audiences react to political violence. This approach offers researchers and policymakers greater analytic precision regarding how political violence is gendered.

Was Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff victim of a coup or removed through a legal process of impeachment? The heated debate on the 2016 ousting of Brazil's president testifies to the growing controversy around the definition of coups. Focusing on Latin America, we show that the use of coups with adjectives have become more frequent in public and scholarly debates. Occurring at a time when coups are becoming rarer, we argue that this development is linked to prevalence-induced concept change, meaning that when instances of a concept become less prevalent, the understanding of the concept expands. The meaning of coups has expanded through a proliferation of adjectives. Coups with adjectives are not new, but recent usage changes the concept from a classic to a family resemblance structure. Although this strategy can avoid stretching and increase differentiation, we urge caution and warn against harmful consequences, whether conceptual, theoretical, or practical.