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Shared qualitative data – such as interview or focus group transcripts – can be used for secondary qualitative data analysis (SQDA). Yet, much archived qualitative data remains unused after primary analysis. Applications and guidance on how to employ SQDA are rare. We use an example application of SQDA studying informal institutions and resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa to show: First, SQDA depends on how primary researchers share 'raw' qualitative data and additional documentation to understand primary context. Second, deductive and inductive uses of SQDA require varying engagement with primary data. Third, current practices of participant consent often do not consider potential SQDA. Fourth, SQDA is not less time-consuming than primary data research but offers different benefits, such as expanding the comparative sample of cases or avoiding research fatigue of studied communities. Going forward, SQDA requires greater consensus on the instruments (e.g. transcripts and participant consent forms) used by researchers and further applications of hypothesis-testing and hypothesis-generating designs.

Recent studies show that traditional institutions and their representatives—such as chiefs or elders—are influential political forces in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. In this paper, we explore the causal mechanism through which traditional institutions increase cooperation and mobilization. We employ a lab-in-the-field experiment using modified public goods games involving the Buganda Kingdom of Uganda. We incorporate references to traditional authority to measure whether participants contribute more when traditional institutions are involved. We explicate and test two possible mechanisms through which traditional institutions might affect cooperation and mobilization: a horizontal mechanism driven by peer-to-peer effects; and a vertical mechanism driven by access to social hierarchies. We find evidence for the latter. This suggests that traditional institutions increase cooperation, because individuals expect that their cooperation and investment will be rewarded by traditional social elites.

Recent studies show that traditional institutions and their representatives – such as chiefs or elders – are influential political forces in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. In this paper, we further explore the causal mechanism through which traditional institutions increase cooperation and mobilization. We employ a lab-in-the-field experiment using modified public goods games involving the Buganda Kingdom of Uganda. We incorporate references to traditional authority to measure whether participants contribute more when traditional institutions are involved. We explicate and test two possible mechanisms through which traditional institutions might affect cooperation and mobilization: a horizontal mechanism driven by peer-to-peer effects; and a vertical mechanism driven by access to social hierarchies. We find evidence for the latter. This suggests the critical role of traditional institutions in increasing cooperation because individuals expect that their cooperation and investment will be rewarded by traditional social elites.

Social scientists have recently observed a 'resurgence' of traditional political institutions on the constitutional level in Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, the scope and causes of the resurgence remain unclear. We base our analysis on original data on the degree of constitutional integration of traditional institutions and on their constitutional resurgence since 1990 in 45 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. We test six theoretical explanations for constitutionalization: former colonial rule, democratization, state capacity, economic development, foreign aid and settlement patterns. First, we verify the broad resurgence of traditional political institutions on a constitutional level. Second, our analysis suggests that, particularly in former British colonies, traditional leaders were able to translate the arrangements of British colonial rule as well as the advantages of a country's deconcentrated settlement pattern into greater constitutional status. Third, settlement patterns proved important for traditional leaders to gain or increase constitutional status – leading to a constitutional resurgence of traditional institutions.

In many parts of the world, people live in "dual polities": they are governed by the state and organize collective decision making within their ethnic community according to traditional rules. We examine the substantial body of works on the traditional–state dualism, focusing on the internal organization of traditional polities, their interaction with the state, and the political consequences of the dualism. We find the descriptions of the internal organization of traditional polities scattered and lacking comparative perspective. The literature on the interaction provides a good starting point for theorizing the strategic role of traditional leaders as intermediaries, but large potentials for inference remain underexploited. Studies on the consequences of "dual polities" for democracy, conflict, and development are promising in their explanatory endeavor, but they do not yet allow for robust conclusions. We therefore propose an institutionalist research agenda addressing the need for theory and for systematic data collection and explanatory approaches.

AbstractIn many American Indian nations the security situation is dire. While scholars have studied how institutions shape economic development in American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) nations, the role of AIAN institutions for security and violent crime has received much less attention—despite the extensive literature highlighting the important role of effective and legitimate institutions in the long‐term decline of violence. We analyze how varying types of American Indian polities and judiciary institutions fare in tackling violent crime using data across 146 American Indian polities. Our findings indicate that more autonomous American Indian criminal justice institutions with specialized court systems are associated with lower violent crime. However, customary justice institutions do not appear to be effective in reducing violent crime, highlighting the problem of cultural mismatch between traditional and formal justice systems. We argue that analyzing AIAN nations provides important insights into how institutional legitimacy can shape violent crime.

Most studies of policy interdependence try to observe international policy networks by focusing on the diffusion of a specific policy across countries. Thus, if that policy is not adopted from one country to the next, researchers usually treat that as a sign of weak interdependence and the lack of diffusion. In this article, we challenge the notion that diffusion processes and interdependence entail the same policy diffusing. National governments usually engage in a bundle of diffusing policies at the same time. We argue that they are often pressed to implement the policy adopted in neighboring countries. But, at the same time, their incentive to implement this policy depends, at least in part, on how much they rely on foreign resources. The greater their dependence, the more likely they are to adopt the policy preferences of foreign constituents. Thus, conditional on a neighbor's pressure to adopt a policy, states may engage in policy alteration—the adoption of an alternative instrument to an internationally diffusing policy. We claim that such policy substitution is especially likely in countries that are less dependent on economic flows, as their governments enjoy more political leeway to turn policy diffusion processes to their advantage. We trace this mechanism using two studies of the diffusion of alternative environmental policies across space and time.

Effectively measuring variation in institutions over time and across jurisdictions is important for examining how institutional characteristics shape political, social, and economic issues. We present a new dataset of American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) constitutions and a new approach for measuring variation in polities using machine learning techniques. Existing data on AIAN institutions have largely been based on costly and time-consuming expert coding and survey approaches, where the end product will become obsolete once institutions change. Our automated content analysis of AIAN constitutional documents allows for more flexible and customizable measurement of the variation, using a larger corpus of data than existing approaches, limited by data collection and coding costs. We consider variation in judicial institutions, previously shown to play a crucial role in AIAN development, and compare our machine coded measures to existing hand coded data for a sample of 97 American Indian constitutions. We show that machine coding replicates expert coded data. Our approach can be easily extended to other topics, including the executive, and shows the potential of automated measures to complement or confirm traditional coding of political institutions.