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Dive into the research topics where Jan H. Pierskalla is active.

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Featured researches published by Jan H. Pierskalla.


Conflict Management and Peace Science | 2016

Civil war violence and political trust: microlevel evidence from Nepal

Alexander De Juan; Jan H. Pierskalla

Exposure to violence can shape people’s political and social perceptions. War-time effects on trust in state institutions are particularly relevant for political stability in the aftermath of violent conflict. If people distrust the state, they are less likely to endorse reform plans, will be less inclined to comply with state rules and regulations, and may uphold support for challengers of state authority. Our paper contributes to the understanding of the role of violence for trust in the national government. We use high-quality, geo-referenced survey data, joined with village-level information on civil war casualties, to estimate the effects of exposure to violence on political trust in Nepal. We find that exposure to violence matters for reducing trust in the national government. This association seems to be mainly driven by effects of violence at the outbreak of the conflict as well as at the end of the civil war period under investigation. These findings shed new light on the complex associations between exposure to violence and political trust.


Comparative Political Studies | 2015

Indigenous Identity, Natural Resources, and Contentious Politics in Bolivia: A Disaggregated Conflict Analysis, 2000-2011

Annegret Mähler; Jan H. Pierskalla

How do natural resources and ethnic identity interact to incite or to mitigate social conflict? This article argues that high-value natural resources can act as an important catalyst for the politicization of ethnic, specifically indigenous identity, and contribute to social conflict as they limit the malleability of identity frames and raise the stakes of confrontations. We test this argument using unique sub-national data from Bolivian provinces. Drawing on Bolivian newspaper reports, we code conflict events for all of the 112 provinces from 2000 to 2011. We join this conflict data with information on local ethnic composition from the census, the political representation of ethnic groups at the national level, as well as geo-spatial information on gas deposits. Using time-series cross-sectional count models, we show a significant conflict-promoting effect of the share of indigenous people in provinces with gas reserves, but not without.


The Journal of Politics | 2017

Government Fragmentation and Public Goods Provision

Guy Grossman; Jan H. Pierskalla; Emma Boswell Dean

We investigate the effects of territorial government fragmentation on the quality of public services. We argue that an increase in the number of regional governments has two effects: (1) it redistributes fiscal and administrative resources to underserved regions and (2) encourages yardstick competition. Extreme government fragmentation, however, limits efficiency gains by reducing administrative capacity, economies of scale, and enabling capture. We test this argument using original data on the number of regional governments in sub-Saharan Africa (1960–2012). Consistent with our theoretical expectations, we find robust evidence for an initial increase in the quality of services provision following regional government splits, which levels off at high levels of regional fragmentation. Three distinct difference-in-difference analyses of microlevel, georeferenced data on health outcomes in Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda further support our theoretical argument.


Political Research Quarterly | 2015

The Pacifying Effects of Local Religious Institutions : An Analysis of Communal Violence in Indonesia

Alexander De Juan; Jan H. Pierskalla; Johannes Vüllers

This paper tests whether local religious institutions have a dampening effect on the probability of communal violence. It argues that a dense layer of institutions strengthens horizontal and vertical contacts and networks within religious communities. Horizontal linkages help to bridge social, economic, and ethnic divisions. Vertical contacts enable religious leaders to stay informed about communal grievances among their followers and to coordinate conflict resolution attempts. In our analysis of more than 60,000 villages in Indonesia, we are able to document a statistically significant and substantively meaningful negative effect of the density of local religious institutions on the probability of mass fighting. This effect is robust to the inclusion of an exhaustive list of confounding variables and alternative measures of violence. We present additional evidence that this pacifying effect of religious institutions is weaker or absent in conflicts that evolve along explicitly religious cleavages.


Terrorism and Political Violence | 2016

The Effects of Oil Production and Ethnic Representation on Violent Conflict in Nigeria: A Mixed-Methods Approach

Carlo Koos; Jan H. Pierskalla

A large qualitative literature on violent conflict in Nigeria has identified the importance of oil production and ethnicity as salient factors in understanding violence, especially in the oil-rich Niger Delta. This resonates with the broader literature on natural resources, ethnic exclusion, and conflict. This article advances existing research by providing the first highly disaggregated statistical analysis of oil, ethnicity, and violence for Nigerian Local Government Areas (LGAs). We test whether oil production in a weak state environment, and local groups’ access to governmental power, affect the level of violence in Nigeria. We employ unique disaggregated data on violent conflict events, proprietary data on oil production, and newly collected information on local ethnic groups’ access to the federal government for 774 LGAs. We find strong evidence that LGAs with oil infrastructure experience significantly more violence than others, while access to the federal government significantly reduces violence. We complement these findings with a qualitative investigation of violent conflicts in Nigeria.


Politics & Society | 2017

The Comparative Politics of Colonialism and Its Legacies: An Introduction

Alexander De Juan; Jan H. Pierskalla

What are the causes and consequences of colonial rule? This introduction to the special issue “Comparative Politics of Colonialism and Its Legacies” surveys recent literature in political science, sociology, and economics that addresses colonial state building and colonial legacies. Past research has made important contributions to our understanding of colonialism’s long-term effects on political, social, and economic development. Existing work emphasizes the role of critical junctures and institutions in understanding the transmission of those effects to present-day outcomes and embraces the idea of design-based inference for empirical analysis. The four articles of this special issue add to existing research but also represent new research trends: increased attention to (1) the internal dynamics of colonial intervention; (2) noninstitutional transmission mechanisms; (3) the role of context conditions at times of colonial intervention; and (4) a finer-grained disaggregation of outcomes, explanatory factors, and units of analysis.


Politics & Society | 2017

Constructing the State: Macro Strategies, Micro Incentives, and the Creation of Police Forces in Colonial Namibia

Alexander De Juan; Fabian Krautwald; Jan H. Pierskalla

How do states build a security apparatus after violent resistance against state rule? This article argues that in early periods of state building two main factors shape the process: the macro-strategic goals of the state and administrative challenges of personnel management. These dynamics are studied in the context of the establishment of police forces in the settler colony of German Southwest Africa, present-day Namibia. The empirical analysis relies on information about the location of police stations and a near full census of police forces, compiled from the German Federal Archives. A mismatch is found between the allocation of police presence and the allocation of police personnel. The first was driven by the strategic value of locations in terms of extractive potential, political importance, and the presence of critical infrastructure, whereas the allocation of individual officers was likely affected by adverse selection, which led to the assignment of low-quality recruits to strategically important locations.


The Journal of Politics | 2018

Unpaved Road Ahead: The Consequences of Election Cycles for Capital Expenditures

Jan H. Pierskalla; Audrey Sacks

Canonical political budget cycle theories predict an increase in visible government expenditures in election years due to signaling by incumbents. We identify the presence of an alternative election-related distortion of government budgets—a drop in capital expenditures—that applies in low capacity and weak governance settings. In election years, the increase in scrutiny and distraction of politicians and bureaucrats decreases the ability of governments to facilitate complicated capital investments. We test this argument by exploiting the exogenous phasing in and timing of local direct elections in Indonesian districts and detailed data on local budget compositions to document the existence of meaningful reductions in capital expenditures in election years. This effect is mediated by the status of incumbents. While safe incumbents who are running for reelection can avoid this particular type of distortion, elections with embattled incumbents or without incumbents running for reelection exhibit much stronger effects.


Research & Politics | 2017

A re-assessment of reporting bias in event-based violence data with respect to cell phone coverage

Florian M. Hollenbach; Jan H. Pierskalla

This paper discusses the issue of possible reporting bias in media-based violent-event data and its relation to the role of communication technology in fostering collective action. We expand the work of Weidmann (2016), presenting several sensitivity analyses to determine the degree to which reporting bias may confound the relationship between communication technology and violence in a recent study that relies on event data for Africa. We find no strong evidence that suggests results on the positive relationship between communication technology and collective action in the study by Pierskalla and Hollenbach (2013) are wholly an artifact of reporting bias.


Quarterly Journal of Political Science | 2017

Order, Distance, and Local Development over the Long-Run

Jan H. Pierskalla; Anna Schultz; Erik Wibbels

We argue that local, long-term exposure to a centralized political authority determines sub-national patterns of contemporary economic development. Older research on economic development has focused on cross-national income accounts, often ignoring the large sub-national variation in income differences. Likewise, research on the effects of political institutions on development has mostly neglected sub-national variation in the institutional environment. Yet a growing body of work shows that the geographic reach of states within countries and their ability to foster economic exchange have varied dramatically through history. We contribute to recent research on sub-national development by creating a new measure of local historical exposure to state institutions that codes geographic distance to historical capital cities and use highly spatially disaggregated data on economic development, based on satellite data, to test their relationship. We find clear evidence, using fixed-effects estimations for both European and global data, that local historical proximity to capital cities is associated with higher levels of economic development. This finding is further substantiated through a number of robustness checks covering alternative measures, specifications, and sensitivity analyses.

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Alexander De Juan

German Institute of Global and Area Studies

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Annegret Mähler

German Institute of Global and Area Studies

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Carlo Koos

German Institute of Global and Area Studies

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Guy Grossman

University of Pennsylvania

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