Jesse Driscoll

Commitment Problems or Bidding Wars? Rebel Fragmentation as Peace-Building

After highly fragmented civil wars, order is often secured through the selective co-optation of rebel field commanders and atomized insurgents. This paper presents a formal model of civil war settlement as a coalition formation game between various regime and rebel factions. This approach emphasizes the ability of installed civilian rulers to lure warlords into the state based on promises of future wealth, then use divide-and-rule tactics to pit different warlord factions against one another. Quantitative and qualitative data from Tajikistan, including an original data set of warlord incorporation and regime purges during wartime reconstruction, are used to evaluate the model.

Intended and unintended consequences of democracy promotion assistance to Georgia after the Rose Revolution

What are the political consequences of democratization assistance to regimes transitioning from authoritarian rule? By exploiting the downstream effects of a field experiment designed to encourage citizen monitoring of Georgia’s 2008 parliamentary elections, we evaluate the political consequences of one type of democracy promotion aid. The intervention increased citizen activism, but it also had the unanticipated effect of suppressing overall voter turnout by approximately 5%. We hypothesize that the civic education campaign was interpreted as a sign of increased political attention to a selected voting precinct, which suppressed opposition turnout. Two additional experiments provide additional evidence for the hypothesis.

Language Hierarchies in Georgia: An Experimental Approach

ABSTRACT How do Georgian citizens of different nationalities evaluate people when they speak in different languages? This article presents the results of three sets of “matched-guise” experiments, a method long used by sociolinguists to evaluate attitudes to different language varieties and their speakers. The results are revealing of the language hierarchies that prevail in Tbilisi and in the southern border regions of Samtskhe-Javakheti and Kvemo Kartli (where Georgias Armenian and Azerbaijani populations are concentrated). Our results suggest that social rewards for linguistic assimilation from one national group to another are very low in both rural and urban parts of Georgia. These findings show that with linguistic assimilation unrewarded, contemporary language hierarchies leave room for Russian to be sustained as a bridge language between communities. The results also show that native speakers of English are afforded higher social status than native speakers of Russian in Tbilisi.

Did Georgian Voters Desire Military Escalation in 2008? Experiments and Observations

In a foreign policy crisis between a strong and weak state, do citizens of the weaker party punish or reward a leader that escalates the crisis? Strong evidence suggests that there were electoral incentives for Georgian escalation in its August 2008 war with Russia. This article combines data from survey experiments, conducted on Georgian voters just weeks prior to the August 2008 war, with open-ended survey response questions from a survey fielded just weeks after the war. Respondents evaluated their leader’s crisis behavior in the aftermath of a real war differently than the evidence from pre-war survey experiments would have suggested. The divergence in findings is demonstrated by providing evidence of three empirical phenomena: a “Rally ’Round the Flag” effect, a “Fog of War” effect, and systematic differences in evaluations of leader performance depending on respondents’ proximity to actual violence.

With Friends Like These: Brinkmanship and Chain-Ganging in Russia's Near Abroad

ABSTRACT Unrecognized statelets may be forming in the Eastern Donbas region of Ukraine under the aegis of Russian protection—a “frozen conflict.” Georgias past provides a useful cautionary tale in reference to Ukraines probable future. The very same conceptual debates that are currently underway in the West with respect to Ukraine—“credibility of great-power security guarantees versus chain-ganging”—have, over the past twenty years, generated policies that facilitated the rise of political coalitions within Georgia that prefer war with Russia to any other outcome.