Marc L. Hutchison

Capacity to trust? Institutional capacity, conflict, and political trust in Africa, 2000–2005

Civil conflict and state failure has often been linked to breakdowns in regime legitimacy. Trust in government is a critical element of regime legitimacy and the state’s ability to mediate between the demands of competing groups within society. We contend that government capability is a primary factor in shaping individuals’ ascription of legitimacy to the state. Capable governments foster perceptions of legitimacy while poor institutional performance decreases the degree to which individuals trust their government. While some tests of this relationship exist in extant literature, much of the work fails to integrate both micro- and macro-level factors, is confined to regions with established state performance, or is based on single-country studies. Our approach avoids many of these deficiencies by using 32 Afrobarometer surveys collected across 16 different countries from 2000 to 2005 and employing hierarchical linear models to estimate the effects of temporal-specific, state-level variables on levels of individual trust. We find that higher institutional capacity is associated with increased levels of individual trust in government across African countries. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this effect on political trust is independent of other individual-level attitudes, socio-economic characteristics, and a state’s prior internal conflicts.

Taking Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: Conventional Arms Races During Periods of Rivalry

This article revisits the arms race to war relationship with the hope of resolving a lingering debate in international relations over the effects of arms races. Previous empirical studies in this area suffered from a possible selection effect, rendering them unable to differentiate between the escalatory and deterrent effects of arms races. Specifically, earlier quantitative investigations were unable to test deterrence hypotheses, because the unit of analysis (dispute) presupposed that deterrence had already failed in preventing dispute onset. In order to take the possibility of deterrence seriously, a dataset is constructed that identifies arms races independently of dispute occurrence. This article improves on previous studies in that a measure of interdependent arming exogenous to dispute initiation allows for a test of whether arms races actually deter the onset of militarized disputes or contribute to dispute escalation. Both the deterrence and escalation hypotheses are tested using a sample of ‘strategic rivals’ from 1816 to 1993. The analyses reveal that arms races increase the likelihood of disputes and war. Furthermore, to account for the possibility that the arms race to war relationship may be spurious to dyadic hostilities accounting for both arms races and war, a selection model is employed that differentiates between dispute and war processes. This indicates that arms races do not contribute to deterrence and are instead associated with both disputes and war.

Individual Identity Attachments and International Conflict The Importance of Territorial Threat

This article provides some of the first individual-level evidence for the domestic salience of territorial issues. Using survey data from more than 80,000 individual respondents in 43 separate countries, we examine how conflict affects the content of individual self-identification. We find that international conflict exerts a strong influence on the likelihood and content of individual self-identification, but this effect varies with the type of conflict. Confirming nationalist theories of territorial salience, territorial conflict leads the majority of individuals in targeted countries to identify themselves as citizens of their country. However, individuals in countries that are initiating territorial disputes are more likely to self-identify as members of a particular ethnicity, which provides support for theories connecting domestic salience to ethnic politics. That conflict has variegated effects on identity formation suggests the relationship is not endogenous. Our within-case analysis of changes in Nigerian self-identifications further demonstrates that individuals are quite susceptible to the types and locations of international conflict.

Tolerating Threat? The Independent Effects of Civil Conflict on Domestic Political Tolerance

Research on civil conflict focuses primarily on identifying underlying and proximate causes while leaving many questions of subsequent social consequences unanswered. Few studies have systematically examined how these conflicts affect public opinion, especially tolerance attitudes. Additionally, cross-national comparisons reveal significant differences in political tolerance levels but few explanations accounting for this variation. In this study, I bring together these disparate literatures and demonstrate the negative, independent effects of civil conflict on political tolerance levels across thirty-two countries. Examining data from the 1995–97 World Values Survey using several statistical techniques to ameliorate problems with endogeneity and multilevel data, I find that civil conflict dampens the public’s willingness to extend basic civil liberties to nonconformist groups. By assessing the extent of domestic intolerance generated by various forms of civil conflict, this study makes important contributions to existing literatures and, more importantly, identify another obstacle to sustained peace in postconflict societies.

Territorial Threat and the Decline of Political Trust in Africa: A Multilevel Analysis

Theorists of international conflict argue that territory is an unusually salient issue to states and, by extension, their publics. Comparing competing insights from the “rally-round-the-flag” literature and those derived from theories of the state, I examine which theory best explains the effects of external threats to territory on levels of domestic trust. Using information from twenty-eight Afrobarometer surveys of sixteen different countries between 1999 and 2004, I assess the relationship between external threat and political trust using cross-sectional, multilevel models. The results challenge the rally effect hypothesis and suggest that government approval moderates the effect of territorial threat on trust. These findings demonstrate the salience of territorial issues domestically and generate novel insights about approval and trust in Africa.

The Impact of Persistent Terrorism on Political Tolerance: Israel, 1980 to 2011

How do persistent terrorist attacks influence political tolerance, a willingness to extend basic liberties to ones enemies? Studies in the U.S. and elsewhere have produced a number of valuable insights into how citizens respond to singular, massive attacks like 9/11. But they are less useful for evaluating how chronic and persistent terrorist attacks erode support for democratic values over the long haul. Our study focuses on political tolerance levels in Israel across a turbulent 30-year period, from 1980 to 2011, which allows us to distinguish the short-term impact of hundreds of terrorist attacks from the long-term influence of democratic longevity on political tolerance. We find that the corrosive influence of terrorism on political tolerance is much more powerful among Israelis who identify with the Right, who have also become much more sensitive to terrorism over time. We discuss the implications of our findings for other democracies under threat from terrorism.

Territorial Threat, Mobilization, and Political Participation in Africa

The link between territorial issues and incidents of militarized conflict is one of the most consistent patterns found in the empirical study of international relations. Consequently, disputes over territory are generally perceived to be more salient to state decision-makers than other types of issues. Given this relative issue salience, state elites are thought to be more likely to engage in domestic mobilization efforts when territory is externally threatened. The political participation literature observes wide cross-national differences in participatory behavior and contends that the level and timing of participation is partially a function of elite-led strategic mobilization. I propose that these phenomena are connected and that territorial threats are associated with overall patterns in non-voting political participation across countries. I assess this relationship with cross-national, multilevel models using 27 Afrobarometer surveys collected in 16 different countries from 1999 to 2003. As expected, if salient external threats are triggering domestic mobilization efforts, I find that territorial threats are positively associated with most forms of non-voting political participation. However, I also observe lower levels of protest behavior in states that recently experienced a territorial threat—a finding that corresponds with previous research linking salient external threats to increased societal cohesion.

Territorial Issues, Audience Costs, and the Democratic Peace: The Importance of Issue Salience

Democratic leaders are more prone to domestic sanction following defeats, and these audience costs allow democracies to signal their intentions during public disputes. Empirical tests strongly support this relationship; however, recent criticisms have questioned whether the causal mechanisms of audience costs are responsible for these findings. We provide a unified rationale for why both arguments are correct: democracies rarely contend over territorial issues, a consistently salient and contentious issue. Without these issues, leaders are unable to generate audience costs but are able to choose easy conflicts. Our reexaminations of threat-based and reciprocation-based studies support this argument. We also present tests of within-dispute behavior using MID incident data, which confirms that the salience of territory matters more than regime type when predicting militarized behavior. Any regime differences suggest a disadvantage for democratic challengers over territorial issues, and any peace between democracies results from the dearth of salient issues involving these regimes.

Hybridity, Political Order and Legitimacy: Examples from Nigeria

Africa is a region characterised by state fragility based largely on the failure of Western-style institutions. This article argues that local/hybrid political order can emerge as a response to lack of access and persistent sub-national concentrations (decentralisation) of power in post-colonial states. The role of sharia in producing political trust in three states in Nigeria is examined and the argument advanced that even in divided states it can function to increase trust, thereby providing legitimacy. The study finds broad support for the contention that hybrid political orders produce greater legitimacy, with trust in local and national governments reflected in Kebbi, Kaduna, and Zamfara states that generally exceed national averages.

Trust in China? The impact of development, inequality, and openness on political trust across China’s provinces, 2001–2012:

China has long represented a puzzle for scholars of democracy, who view political trust as an important indicator of regime legitimacy. Previous studies show that while democracies around the world experienced declining levels of political trust, the authoritarian Chinese government maintained unexpectedly high levels of trust. Using World Value Survey (WVS) data over a critical 12-year period (2001–2012) and multilevel modeling techniques, we explore both macro- and individual-level determinants of political trust in China. We find that province-level economic performance and individual-level income combine to influence political trust. Higher levels of individual-level income have a positive effect on trust in more developed provinces but an opposite effect in less developed provinces. Furthermore, individuals living in provinces with higher levels of inequality and openness tend to be less trusting of government. Our study offers critical insights not only for political trust in China but also the country’s political future.