Christopher Reenock

Economic Performance, Institutional Intermediation, and Democratic Survival

The breakdown of democracies has long been associated with poor economic performance. This study attempts to determine whether different configurations of democratic institutions can mediate the effects of poor economic performance. Using an original data set that includes all democracies from the period 1919 to 1995, we use continuous-time duration analysis to test hypotheses derived from the literature on democratization. Specifically, we test the interaction of party system and the configuration of legislative and executive power (parliamentarism and presidentialism) with economic performance to explain the likelihood of breakdown. Results suggest that majoritarian variants of democracy are more resistant to economic contraction than pluralist ones. Under conditions of economic growth, pluralist democracies outperform majoritarian ones.

ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE AND SURVIVAL IN NEW DEMOCRACIES Is There a Honeymoon Effect

In the literature on democratic survival, theories of democratic consolidation assume that new democracies are more vulnerable to breakdown. Theories of democratic honeymoons, however, claim that new democracies are less vulnerable to breakdown. This article addresses this seeming contradiction. Using an original data set that includes all democracies from the period 1951 to 1995, the authors use discrete-time duration analysis to determine if there is evidence for a period of enhanced survivability in new democracies. Using both continuous and discrete specifications of a honeymoon period, they test whether new democracies experience an absolute honeymoon (whether newness in itself makes them less prone to breakdown) or a relative honeymoon (where newness insulates them from the effect of poor economic performance). The results suggest that there is a short-lived absolute honeymoon, but that new democracies are actually more vulnerable to effects of poor economic performance prior to their third legislative election.

Compliance Bias and Environmental (In)Justice

Scholarship on race- and class-based disparities in regulatory outcomes has failed to provide a theoretically grounded account of this bias’ origin. We address this shortcoming by providing a microlevel explanation of how demographics influence compliance bias or the failure to detect noncompliant firms. We argue that regulatory compliance is best understood as a dual-agent—firm and regulatory officer—production function, and that community mobilization and agency decision-making authority shape bureaucrats’ incentives to report noncompliance. We test our argument with an original dataset on community mobilization and agency structure that delineates the political costs and benefits of state regulatory officers implementing the U.S. Clean Air Act. Using detection-controlled estimation, we find that while certain communities are vulnerable to compliance bias, such bias is mitigated in the presence of either politically mobilized communities or decentralized enforcement authority within the implementing agency.

Substitutable Protections: Credible Commitment Devices and Socioeconomic Insulation

Scholars have argued that credible commitment institutions have important impacts on political outcomes as diverse as economic growth and social order. If commitment institutions function as theorized, then their effects should vary across individuals, groups, or states, based on their respective vulnerability to promise breaking. Yet existing empirical studies never pursue this implication. The failure to do so risks a number of inferential errors and can lead to suboptimal policy prescriptions for institutional reform. In this article, the authors develop and provide empirical evidence for these claims within the context of a commitment problem that scholars believe undermines social order.

Legal Institutions and Democratic Survival

Do institutions designed to limit arbitrary government promote the survival of democratic regimes? Although the international effort to build the rule of law is predicated on a belief that they do, mainstream research on democratic survival typically treats institutions as epiphenomenal. We argue that institutions encourage regime survival by addressing problems of monitoring and social coordination that complicate democratic compromise. We find that property-rights institutions generally, and judicial institutions specifically, encourage survival, especially when macroeconomic conditions favor inter-class compromise.

Regulatory Enforcement, Riskscapes, and Environmental Justice

Does environmental regulation vary over poor and minority communities? An uneven governmental response may follow from regulators’ varying incentives to negotiate enforcement challenges. We argue that regulators confront two in particular. Regulators can pursue political enforcement, responding to mobilized interests, regardless of environmental risk, or they can pursue instrumental enforcement, responding to at risk communities, regardless of political mobilization. To examine these competing strategies, we use an original dataset from the EPA’s Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators (RSEI) model to develop a geographic “riskscape�? combined with census tract community data and facility-level enforcement data. We find that state regulatory agencies pursue a mixture of political and instrumental enforcement but that these tactics are applied unevenly across traditional environmental justice communities. Poor communities and those exposed to higher risks attract regulatory attention, while African American and Hispanic communities do not. Importantly, inattention to Hispanic communities is not mediated by the relative risk levels they face.

Substitutable Protections: Socioeconomic Insulation and Credible Commitment Devices

Do beliefs in the credibility of institutions designed to constrain the state from violating rights affect the behavior of all individuals equally? We argue that the effect depends on how insulated an individual is from rights violations. We test this argument against individual-level data on democratic regime support, confidence in legal institutions and a socioeconomic factor that protects a person from physical integrity violations. Consistent with our substitution argument, the effect of institutional confidence on democratic support decreases as insulation increases; and, the effect of insulation decreases as institutional confidence increases. This analysis suggests that commitment models overestimate and underestimate institutional effects when they fail to account for insulation.