WORKING PAPERS Partisan Response to Term Limit Subversion and Democratic Backsliding: Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire, with Irene Morse
Across Africa we see manifestations of democratic backsliding – particularly attempts at term limit subversion – that are met with either resistance or compliance. How do partisans respond to these episodes of democratic backsliding? We argue that the response to these episodes will be predicated on how democracy is understood across the political spectrum. Particularly in post-conflict settings, incumbent supporters see democracy as fundamentally maintaining peace and reconciliation and will not mobilize against backsliding if it aligns with these goals. In contrast, opposition supporters understand democracy procedurally and thus will mobilize despite concerns about potential violence in doing so. To test this argument, we leverage two sources of data from Côte d’Ivoire, where the incumbent president made a successful bid at a third term in 2020: computational text analysis of over 1 million public posts in groups supporting political actors collected before and after the term limit subversion attempt and three rounds of Afrobarometer from 2015-2019. We show that first, understandings of democracy vary along the political spectrum. We then show that when a signal of democratic backsliding occurs, partisans change their discussion in line with our expectations: incumbent supporters maintain the relationship between peace and democracy without protest, while opposition supporters focus on procedural violations of democratic principles. These findings have implications for both policy and the scholarly community: if groups do not agree about what democracy fundamentally is, then it will make it difficult to recover from episodes of backsliding such as third term attempts. Further, we need to understand the differences between how different groups think about democracy before we can understand support or challenges in the face of backsliding.
Competing Frames and Policymakers' Preferences for LGBT+ Protection: Experimental Evidence from Zambia, with Leonardo Arriola, Danny Choi, Melanie Phillips, and Lise Rakner
When are politicians willing to extend formal social protections to LGBT+ minorities? While the protection of civil liberties and rights for LGBT+ communities continues to feature prominently in political debates around the world, there is limited understanding of the factors that shape the views of politicians who enact the laws that govern these protections. This study examines the effectiveness of two competing frames – that cast the protection of LGBT+ individuals either as a public health crisis or a human rights crisis – that advocacy organizations frequently employ to persuade policymakers to liberalize their position on LGBT+ minority protection. Drawing on a survey and experiment conducted among more than 600 political candidates who contested for national and local office in Zambia, we show that gender moderates the effectiveness of different frames: whereas female politicians are significantly more likely to respond to the public health frame than the human rights frame, the effects are the opposite for male politicians. An analysis of open-ended responses provides suggestive evidence regarding the mechanism underlying these effects; the human rights frame appears to have reduced politicians' tendency to dehumanize members of the LGBT+ community.
Partisanship, Gender, and the Structure of Politician Networks in Zambia, with Leonardo Arriola, Danny Choi, Melanie Phillips, and Lise Rakner Although women have entered government in African countries at an unprecedented rate over the past three decades, it remains unknown to what extent they have acquired the influence necessary to shape policymaking. Are women able to exercise personal influence to the same degree or in the same ways as their male counterparts? We argue that women tend to be less influential than men due to the structure of their personal networks with other politicians. Prior scholarship on African politics has demonstrated that political outcomes depend on the personal ties that connect politicians to one other. Based on a novel network survey among Zambian candidates, we demonstrate that women tend to be peripherally situated within networks. We find that women are systematically less likely to be connected to others in social or work networks among politicians. We also demonstrate that, while having fewer connections than men, women have connections with more important people in both social and work networks.