Working papers
+ Daniel L. Tavana. “Endogenous Opposition: Identity and Ideology in Kuwaiti Electoral Politics.” Under review.
How do opposition elites succeed in authoritarian elections? Existing theories of authoritarian politics suggest a pivotal role for elections in enhancing the survival of incumbent dictators. Yet, in many contexts, opposition elites attract considerable support and constrain the policymaking authorities of these dictators. This article presents a theory of endogenous opposition that traces the electoral success of opposition elites to the strategic use of symbolic ideological appeals, or campaign appeals that cast politicians as allies of particular ideological movements. I present quantitative and qualitative evidence in support of my argument from Kuwait. I show that minority elites who use symbolic ideological appeals are more likely to capture voters from other minority groups. Once elected, these legislators are more likely to oppose the ruling family in the legislature. These findings challenge existing theories of authoritarian politics and point to ideology as an understudied source of opposition success in authoritarian elections.
+ Alexandra Blackman, Elizabeth Nugent, Nick Lotito, and Daniel L. Tavana. “All in the Family? Political Socialization and Legacies of Repression.” Under review.
Scholars of the legacies of state violence have overwhelmingly focused on families as the vehicle through which repression influences political behavior. However, people exist within multiple social groups, and early socialization literature identified both kin and non-kin groups as important components of political socialization. In this paper, we incorporate this insight and explore the comparative effects of repression of family, friends, and community on subsequent political behavior through an original nationally representative survey of 1,200 adult Tunisians combined with 175 sibling pairs of the primary respondents. Our analyses of the primary sample demonstrate that repression of friends under previous authoritarian regimes is a consistently significant predictor of turnout, vote choice, and protest participation. The effect of the repression of friends remains significant even after controlling for family repression using the paired sibling sample. Similar to other forms of indirect exposure to violence, the effect of having friends who were repressed on political behavior is mediated through talking politics with them. Our findings complicate existing narratives that focus on families as the unit through which state violence matters for politics and suggest scholars have likely missed the full extent to which repression affects political behavior.
+ Daniel L. Tavana. “Ideology, Constraint, and Support for Authoritarian Rule.”
Until recently, the empirical study of ideology in authoritarian regimes has received little attention. In these contexts, can ideology be used to describe the ways in which ordinary citizens organize their political attitudes and beliefs? Do these attitudes and beliefs exhibit structure and constraint? Answers to these questions in advanced democracies rely heavily on latent variables and their connection to ideological and partisan self-identification. But in many authoritarian regimes, the absence of clear political alternatives (along with weak and fluid partisan attachments) suggests a need for greater theorizing and a new set of tools. Using original data from a large-scale nationally representative survey, I study ideology in the Islamic Republic of Iran. I draw on recent advances in psychology and sociology to introduce an understanding of ideology as a network. I find that citizen preferences are organized along four dimensions: democratic/authoritarian institutions, secularism/Islamism, internationalism/nationalism, and gender inclusivity/exclusivity. Those who prefer authoritarian institutions, Islamism, nationalism and gender exclusivity are more likely to self-report support for the regime and exhibit greater ideological constraint. These findings suggest that political preferences are organized and constrained, but heterogeneous---and speak to the regime's informational advantage in sustaining popular support for authoritarian rule.
+ Daniel L. Tavana, Christiana Parreira, and Lindsay Walsh. “Lebanon’s October Uprising and the Rise of Electoral Opposition.”
In the absence of regime change, protest movements persistently struggle to channel anti-government, revolutionary opposition into support for alternative movements, parties, and candidates in subsequent national elections. A core finding in the contentious politics literature traces this difficulty to the polarization and fragmentation that emerges in revolutionary moments. Less is known, however, about cases where opposition movements overcome these challenges and mount successful electoral challenges to incumbent regimes. This paper explores the sources of this success in Lebanon, where the 2019 October Uprising resulted in the emergence of new, electorally successful opposition movements with roots in the protests themselves. Using a mixed-methods approach, we show how the uprising shaped subsequent patterns of political participation and electoral behavior in the 2022 legislative election. A difference-in-differences design shows that support for opposition-aligned lists doubled and support for incumbent candidates decreased by 50% in municipalities that experienced at least one protest. Further statistical tests and elite interviews suggest that these dynamics were driven by the adoption of explicitly anti-sectarian messaging and abstention from more violent, disruptive tactics. Our findings contribute new insight into the relationship between protest movements and electoral behavior in contexts where identity is politically salient.
In progress
+ Daniel L. Tavana, Kevan Harris, and Zep Kalb. “Mass Protest and Electoral Behavior in Authoritarian Regimes: Evidence from the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
How do protest events shape support for incumbents in contemporary authoritarian regimes? Recent evidence from advanced democracies suggests mass protest plays a pivotal role in shaping the electoral attitudes and behaviors of voters. To date, fewer studies have theorized an electoral connection in authoritarian regimes, where protest and participation in non-democratic elections occur concurrently. In this paper, we develop and test a theory that links the incidence of protest with participation in a subsequent election. Drawing on a unique dataset of protest events in the year leading up to the 2021 presidential election, we show that local-level protest intensity resulted in a decline in support for Ebrahim Raisi, an anointed pro-government candidate who won the election. To do this, we pair this dataset with a nationally representative post-election survey to trace the mechanisms linking protest intensity with voter behavior. We then supplement these findings with a staggered difference-in-differences design that compares results from the 2017 and 2021 elections. We use a variety of statistical tests to assess endogeneity concerns. Our findings lend support to the argument that mass protest can serve as a powerful constraint to the electoral machinations of autocrats who hold non-democratic findings. The paper probes the implications of our findings for the study of authoritarian politics. Mass protest may demobilize citizens: but this demobilization can blunt the support of incumbents and facilitate the expansion of opposition to authoritarian rule.
+ Erin York and Daniel L. Tavana. “Ideological Positioning in the Kuwait National Assembly.”
How do legislative elections and the ideology of the winners affect policy outcomes in authoritarian legislatures? Policy-making within authoritarian legislatures has long been a black box. Recent work has demonstrated these institutions matter for policy-making, but the role of legislator preferences in this process has not been clearly established. In this paper, we adapt a spatial model of roll call voting to study the history of policy-making in the Kuwaiti National Assembly from 1963 to 2016. We employ a Bayesian Item Response Theory model to extract information about legislator preferences and policy decisions from a vast database (n = 184000) of roll call votes on proposed legislation. We use the resulting estimates to explore ideological cleavages between pro- and anti-regime actors in periods with varying electoral institutions and on differing policy topics. We identify scenarios in which disparate opposition groups were able to form legislative coalitions as well as periods in which they experienced deeper policy cleavages to demonstrate how the regime stokes ideological divisions amongst groups that acquire legislative representation. Finally, we explore determinants of ideological positioning amongst legislators and find that they are a function of sociological factors (tribe and religion) in addition to partisan influence. The results shed light on the strategic behavior of the regime in manipulating legislator behavior as well as on the importance of legislative composition for resulting policy.