Sarah Sunn Bush

International Politics and the Spread of Quotas for Women in Legislatures

Quotas to promote womens representation in the worlds legislatures have spread to more than one hundred countries. The diffusion of gender quotas poses a puzzle since they have often been adopted in countries where women have low status. International influence and inducements best explain quota adoption in developing countries. Promoting gender equality, including through gender quotas, has become a key part of international democracy promotion. The international legitimacy of gender quotas leads them to be adopted through two causal pathways: directly, through postconflict peace operations, and indirectly, by encouraging countries, especially those that depend on foreign aid, to signal their commitment to democracy by adopting quotas. An event history analysis, which controls for other relevant factors, shows that the hypothesized relationships exist. Further support comes from a process-tracing analysis of Afghanistans 2004 quota.

The Promise and Limits of Election Observers in Building Election Credibility

Scholars and practitioners posit that election observers (EOs) affect local beliefs about the credibility of elections. Although these effects have important implications for democratization, they remain largely unexamined at the individual level. This article applies models of Bayesian opinion updating and motivated reasoning to illuminate the conditions under which EOs change beliefs about elections. Experimental evidence from a national survey fielded immediately following the first democratic parliamentary election in Tunisia tests the argument. Two important findings emerge. First, exposure to EOs’ positive and negative statements produces a small but significant difference in individuals’ perceptions of the election on average. Second, EOs’ negative statements cause the election’s main losing partisans—who may have had weak prior beliefs that the election was credible and were likely receptive to critical information—to believe the election was significantly less credible. These findings establish a baseline for future work on how third-party monitors shape local perceptions of political processes.

The Effects of Authoritarian Iconography: An Experimental Test

Do public images of state leaders affect individuals’ political attitudes and behaviors? If so, why do they have that effect and among whom? Authoritarian iconography could increase compliance with and support for the state via three causal mechanisms: legitimacy, self-interest, and coercion. This article uses a laboratory experiment in the United Arab Emirates to evaluate the effect of public images of state leaders on individuals’ compliance with and support for an authoritarian regime. Using a pre-registered research design, it finds no meaningful evidence that authoritarian iconography increases political compliance or support for the Emirati regime. Although these null results may be due to a number of factors, the findings have important implications for the future research agenda on how and why authoritarian leaders use political culture to maintain power.

Small Tribes, Big Gains: The Strategic Uses of Gender Quotas in the Middle East

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from City University of New York via the DOI in this record

The Politics of Rating Freedom: Ideological Affinity, Private Authority, and the Freedom in the World Ratings

The Freedom in the World (FITW) ratings of countries’ freedom, created by Freedom House in 1972, are widely used by many U.S. audiences, including journalists, policymakers, and scholars. Why and how did these ratings acquire private authority in the United States? Furthermore, why and to what extent have they retained private authority over time and across different audiences? Contrary to previous research on private authority, which emphasizes the role of raters’ expertise and independence, I advance an argument that emphasizes the role of ideological affinity between raters and users. Specifically, I argue that ratings are more likely to have authority among actors that share raters’ ideas about concept definition and coding. I also argue that ratings are more likely to have authority among weak actors that depend on powerful other users of the ratings. Diverse evidence and methods—including data on the ratings’ usage, an internal archive of Freedom House records, interviews with key informants, and a statistical analysis of bias—support the argument.

Varieties of International Influence and the Middle East

© American Political Science Association, 2017 doi:10.1017/S1049096517000361 ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................