The following is part of a series of posts written by MPSA award recipients highlighting outstanding research presented at previous MPSA annual conferences and in the American Journal of Political Science.

As many individuals who study partisanship know, politics is about identity. People vote for “their” party and support “their” candidates. In some cases, parties and personalities successfully capture the hearts and minds of individuals. These parties forge a strong sense of partisanship with their supporters. Typically, where this kind of partisanship exists, we see positive feedback effects on the political system. Research has shown that strong party identifiers are more likely to participate in politics. They tend to vote regularly, join political organizations, and participate in protest. Moreover, in certain contexts, partisanship correlates with regime support. It is also an indicator of democratic quality: where citizens exhibit stable preferences over time, parties can more effectively channel their demands.

The potentially positive effects of partisanship are, therefore, multiple. It should come as no surprise, given these widely accepted findings, that a marked decrease in levels of party identification will have negative consequences for a party system and also for a democratic regime. Where partisanship is weak, electoral volatility grows, accountability suffers, and the quality of representative institutions decreases. In the most extreme cases, a loss of partisan identification can provoke the collapse of the party system. When this occurs, voters simultaneously decide to vote every established party out of office. One set of parties is replaced by another, ostensibly overnight. This kind of catastrophic party-system crisis has occurred in several countries, including Bolivia, Italy, Peru, and Venezuela.

Our research seeks to understand what happens to representation in countries that experience major party-system crisis. Party-system collapse represents one kind of party-system crisis. Major crisis also occurs, however, when one or more established parties experiences a sudden decline in votes. In these situations, the electoral supply dramatically changes from one election to the next. Where party systems undergo this kind of rapid and major change, disaffection predominates. Confidence in political parties plummets, and independent candidacies flourish. The political landscape becomes hostile to parties. Under these circumstances, scholars predict that partisanship will be fleeting, if it exists at all.

In our paper, which received the Kellogg/Notre Dame Award for the Best Paper in Comparative Politics, we add nuance to these conclusions. We show that, in post-crisis political systems, marked as they are by instability and high fluidity, anti-identity movements can nonetheless guide the preferences of citizens who hold weak or no partisan sympathies. Anti-identity movements are strong, identity-based predispositions against a particular party or movement. Their adherents are ideologically cohesive in nature. They exhibit certain behavioral tendencies, including a propensity to vote a certain way. In short, we argue that, in unstable political contexts, anti-identity movements can function like conventional partisan identities for their adherents.

To demonstrate the cogency of this argument, we examine anti-identity movements in a region that has undergone serious party-system crisis: the Andean region of Latin America. Specifically, in Peru, Venezuela, and Colombia, parties that dominated politics for years and even decades were rejected by voters, opening up the political system to new “outsider” candidates. These controversial individuals—Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and Alvaro Uribe in Colombia—relied heavily on charisma to govern. They cultivated groups of followers to shore up support for their radical projects. To date, their movements, called fujimorismo, chavismo, and uribismo respectively, have largely transcended formal party organizations—although all three leaders eventually founded a political party to underpin each movement.

The existence of fujimorismo, chavismo, and uribismo has had a profound impact on politics in Peru, Venezuela, and Colombia, respectively. Yet, perhaps even more importantly, even larger groups of individuals who would never support fujimorista, chavista, or uribista candidates have also emerged. In our paper, we focus on these movements. We show that anti-fujimorismo in Peru, anti-chavismo in Venezuela, and anti-uribismo in Colombia are sustained by meaningful, identity-based ties. Each movement attracts adherents who claim they will never vote for a fujimorista, chavista, or uribista candidate. The adherents are consistent in their ideological predispositions, and they vote in ways that are consistent with their beliefs. Overall, we find that anti-identifiers behave in ways that are consistent with positive, partisan identifiers.

This study is the first of a longer project that seeks to better understand the new “-isms” that have emerged in Latin America in the last decades. It represents one of the first comparative applications of social identity theory to political identities in Latin America. As such, it adds to the literature on social identities. It also provides novel insight into political representation and identity in the region.

Indeed, our findings have serious implications for how we understand democratic representation in less stable political systems. We consider the existence of anti-identity political movements after acute party-system crisis—a hallmark of low quality representative institutions. These movements operate in party systems that tend to be dominated by small, ephemeral, or highly regionalized parties with weak roots in society. Yet, our work suggests that a democracy without meaningful party-based representation is not necessarily a democracy without representation. Where identity- and anti-identity-based movements operate, channels exist through which citizens can express at least some of their preferences.

This study also adds to the burgeoning research agenda on negative partisanship. This work has by and large been limited to the study of better institutionalized and more stable party systems. In countries with established two-party systems, for example, we know that an existing anti-identity can have an independent effect on determining vote choices. We also know that positive party identification and ideology drive those negative party evaluations. Individuals vote against one party because of their sense of belonging to another.

Our findings, again, add nuance to this discussion. We show that, in more fluid, multi-party systems, negative partisanship may not be rooted in a coherent positive counterpart. In each of the countries we investigate, a large group of individuals actively oppose Fujimori, Chávez, or Uribe. Despite this strong, consistent tendency to never vote for certain candidates, no single party or leader has emerged in any of the countries to capitalize on the group’s antipathy. We therefore conclude that, in less stable party systems, coherent anti-identities can exist without an equally coherent, positive identity to anchor the negative evaluation. When controversial leaders divide societies, individuals may very easily know whom they are against before they can collectively articulate who they are for. Our work therefore helps us understand how negative partisanship can operate in less stable, more fluid democratic settings.

As mentioned above, the findings here represent just the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to understanding groups similar to anti-chavistas, anti-fujimoristas, and anti-uribistas in Latin America and elsewhere. Our future work, which will include speaking with movement identifiers as well as additional, over-time quantitative data, should add to our initial findings and broaden our understanding of party-less but nevertheless politically cohesive political movements in Latin America and beyond.

About the Authors: Jennifer Cyr is an assistant professor in the School of Government and Policy and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona and Carlos Meléndez is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Universidad Diego Portales. Their research “Anti-Identities in Latin America: Chavismo, Fujimorismo, and Uribismo in Comparative Perspective” was awarded the Kellogg/Notre Dame Award for the best paper in comparative politics presented at the 2016 MPSA conference.

The following is part of a series of posts written by MPSA award recipients highlighting outstanding research presented at previous MPSA annual conferences and in the American Journal of Political Science. The following post was first published on the HistPhil blog and is shared here with permission.

A perennial question in the field of philanthropy is this: How much discretion should donors enjoy in deciding whether to give away their resources, and to whom exactly? Often, it is assumed donors should enjoy wide discretion in deciding how to direct their donations to causes that they–the donors–personally care about. After all, it is their money that they are giving away. But is this assumption justified? I don’t think so.

The question matters, since today many governments have institutionalized such a ‘discretionary view’ of philanthropy. For example, the British Government (HM Government 2011), while encouraging philanthropy to fill the gap left behind after the government withdrawal from the provision of many goods and services, still insists that giving should happen “on the back of free decisions by individuals to give to causes around them” to which “they care about.” Similarly, charitable tax-deductions in the United States leave donors with wide discretion in selecting the organizations that receive their tax-exempted donations.

This discretionary view of philanthropy is also supported by some philosophers who claim that citizens are morally permitted to donate resources to certain causes, rather than to other, more urgent causes, if “one’s vision or life history” makes the former especially important to the donor (Richard Miller, “Beneficence, Duty and Distance,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 32 (2004): 357–83). Even so-called “effective altruists,” who argue that people should donate in order to promote humanitarian outcomes most effectively rather than according to their personal policies, assume that donors have the moral right to choose among available charities. From this perspective, donors should make their choices as if they were making a private investment in those organizations.

In my paper “Reparative Justice and the Limits of Discretionary Philanthropy” (now published as a chapter in Rob Reich, Chiara Cordelli and Lucy Bernholz, eds. Philanthropy in Democratic Societies, The University of Chicago Press, 2016) I argue against this discretionary view. Indeed, I make the case that, under certain conditions, donors are entitled to no personal discretion when deciding how and to whom to give. By “personal discretion” I mean the moral prerogative to appeal to reasons that make reference to a particular agent’s identity, life history, conception of the good, or personal attachments. Minimizing personal discretion, I argue, requires that public officials constrain discretionary forms of philanthropy through appropriate institutions.

Those who allow for donors’ wide discretion assume that donors have full ownership rights over their resources. They regard giving as a duty of beneficence, that is, a duty to use one’s own resources to promote valuable ends, rather than as a duty of justice, that is a duty to return to others what is rightfully theirs. After all, we would all agree that if the money I have in my pockets is not mine but rather yours, I have no right to discretionally decide whether to give the money back to you or not, or whether to give it back to you or to someone else, or whether to give it back to you in cash or in some other form. Debtors cannot be choosers.

But are donors’ resources truly their own, to do with whatever they like? This may be true under ideal conditions. The political philosopher John Rawls famously argued that where political institutions discharge their primary responsibility to secure justice effectively, citizens provide their fellow citizens with what they are rightfully entitled to have. They do so by contributing their fair share of resources to both the redistributive and the public provision branches of government. If that happens, then citizens can be said to rightfully own what remains in their pockets. Then they can do what they want with those resources, including giving them away.

But in many contemporary societies, the division of labor between taxation and donation is blurred. For example, basic education and healthcare in the United States are financed and produced through a very complex hybrid system of public and private funding. The same is true of the UK and continental Europe. Under such conditions, it becomes unclear whether the money philanthropists give away can be regarded as rightfully their own.

Further, when the public provision branch of government shrinks, the well-off tend to benefit from this withdrawal, while the worst-off are harmed. The well-off benefit for several reasons. First, they pay fewer taxes than they would have had to pay to support a just, government-funded system of public provision. Second, they are not themselves damaged by the cuts, for they can self-segregate and afford access to justice-required goods privately through the market. Empirical research, for example Anthony Atkinson’s book Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2015), demonstrates that the rich have benefitted from government withdrawal over the past decades in precisely this way.

Benefiting from a system that unjustly harms the worst-off by depriving them of what they have an entitlement to possess provides reasons to attribute to the wealthy a duty of reparative justice towards the worst-off. By a duty of reparative justice, I mean an agent’s duty to fairly compensate another for harm for which the former can be held liable, where “harm” means a setback to a person’s interests.

Moreover, wealthy citizens may acquire reparative duties even without benefiting at all from injustice. Indeed, I can have a duty to compensate others for an injury that I negligently inflicted on them, regardless of whether I benefit from it or not. Similarly, the wealthy may still acquire duties of reparative justice if they can be held liable for their government underproviding certain goods, regardless of whether they benefit from these policies or not. Now, as a long tradition of democratic theory holds, citizens of minimally legitimate, democratic states may acquire such liability for their states’ unjust policies, carried out in their own name, even if they did not directly vote for those policies. Because of this and other reasons, I argue that wealthy citizens in contemporary democratic societies bear duties of reparative justice towards their fellow citizens who suffer from deprivation as a consequence of insufficient public provision by the government.

The question then becomes how the wealthy should discharge these duties. While wealthy citizens have a duty of distributive justice to support, through political advocacy, more just political institutions, reparative justice demands that we contain the extent of the harm generated by the withdrawal of government provision by providing time-sensitive goods before more just institutions can be brought about. In contemporary societies, given non-ideal conditions, this is what philanthropy should primarily do, or so I argue in my contribution.

Understanding philanthropy as a means of reparative justice has important implications for how donors should give. First, nonpublic reasons that make reference to what donors’ “care about” should play no role in giving decisions. Donors should make these decisions as if they were repaying a debt. This does not mean, however, as it is sometimes assumed, that donors’ decisions should be dictated by the recipients’ preferences. For recipients do not generally get to decide in what currency a debt should be repaid either. All that should guide wealthy donors’ reasoning is a concern about bringing their co-citizens as close as possible to a pre-harm baseline, defined according to sufficientarian principles of justice. In this respect, the focus should be not so much on democratizing philanthropy but in forcing it to track principles of justice (although, in the real world, democratizing philanthropy may be the only way to achieve this purpose). Second, those who are deprived of justice-required and time-sensitive goods such as primary education and maternal care should be served first. Third, and most importantly, governments should strive to minimize donors’ discretion, for example by matching tax deductions with specific causes, selected according to the very same sufficientarian principles of justice. This in turns means that donations to unrelated causes should receive no incentives and there may even be reasons to restrict philanthropy especially when it threatens public commitments to political equality and fair equality of opportunity.

There is a final upshot to my argument. Only by supporting, and ultimately achieving, just public institutions can citizens create the conditions necessary so that private philanthropy might then fulfill the discretionary and expressive wishes of donors. Insufficient state provision is a curse rather than a blessing for philanthropy.

About the Author:  Chiara Cordelli is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Before joining Chicago, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University. Her field of research is contemporary political philosophy. She is the author of several articles on the duties of justice of civil society actors and the co-editor of Philanthropy in Democratic Societies (The University of Chicago Press, 2016).  Additionally Cordelli’s paper “Reparative Justice and the Moral Limits of Discretionary Philanthropy” won the Review of Politics Award for best paper in normative theory presented at the MPSA conference in 2016.

The following is part of a series of posts written by MPSA award recipients highlighting outstanding research presented at previous MPSA annual conferences and in the American Journal of Political Science. The following AJPS Author Summary was first published on the AJPS website and is shared here with permission.

A growing body of research shows that authoritarian regimes can be responsive to ordinary citizens, but why is this the case? Why do those in power in authoritarian regimes expend any effort in dealing with citizens’ everyday complaints and demands when they face no pressure from electoral competition?

Do officials in these regimes respond because they fear collective action of ordinary citizens, because they are worried about sanctions from their superiors, or because responsiveness to citizens is a measure of co-option with particular attention to a core of supporters?

To answer these questions and explore the internal mechanisms of authoritarian responsiveness, we conduct an online experiment among 2,103 Chinese counties. We test whether responsiveness among local officials comes from bottom-up citizen engagement, from top-down oversight of government superiors, or from preferential treatment toward loyal supporters.

In our experiment, we made four types of requests asking for assistance in obtaining social welfare benefits on local government web forums and examined how differences in these requests affected government responses. One request simply described economic hardship (the baseline), while the other three contained the same description but also included additional information: 1) an intention to take some undefined action with other people who face similar hardship if the government cannot help (collective action requests), 2) an intention to complain to upper levels of government if the government cannot help (tattling to superiors requests), and 3) identification as loyal, long-standing Party member (Party loyalist request).

There are three main findings of our experiment. First, we find that the collective action requests and tattling to superiors requests generate higher levels of responsiveness from Chinese local governments than the simple description of economic hardship; the identification as a Party loyalist, however, does not increase responsiveness substantially. With the baseline request, we received responses from approximately one third of counties. To put this number in context, one third is higher than responsiveness of U.S. state legislators to constituents (~20%) but lower than the responsiveness among members the U.S. congress (~40%) on certain issues. [1] Adding the intention of collective action and tattling to superiors both increase response rates by 8-10 percentage points.

The second finding is that the collective action requests, compared with other types of requests, made the local government respond in a more public manner. This could be because local official are really concerned about social instability or because they believe responding publicly is a low-cost strategy to resolve similar problems among many citizens. Finally, we also find that local officials are more likely to provide pertinent and concrete information to citizens when receiving the collective action requests.

Together, these results show that top-down mechanisms of oversight as well as some forms of bottom-up pressure exerted by citizens can increase government responsiveness in this particular authoritarian context. Regardless of whether responsiveness derives from top-down mechanisms or bottom up pressures, citizen engagement seems to be consequential.

[1] Butler, Daniel M, Christopher F Karpowitz and Jeremy C Pope. 2012. “A Field Experiment on Legislators Home Styles: Service versus Policy.” The Journal of Politics 74(02):474–486.

About the Authors:  Jidong Chen of Beijing Normal University, Jennifer Pan of Stanford University, and Yiqing Xu of University of California, San Diego have authored the article, “Sources of Authoritarian Responsiveness: A Field Experiment in China”, published in the April 2016 issue of the American Journal of Political Science, which was awarded the AJPS Best Article Award at the 2017 MPSA Conference. (MPSA members: Log in at http://www.mpsanet.org/AJPS to access.)

Before we get to why many Americans are so attached to firearms, there are some facts to know about guns in America. First, there are 250-350 million firearms in private hands (Cook and Goss, 2014). Since we don’t allow gun registration, the numbers are fuzzy; but that is a lot of guns. Second, according to NORC at the University of Chicago, the proportion of gun-owning households has declined from 47% in 1973 to 31% in 2014. The Census says there are about 125 million households, so about 39 million own guns. The math suggests that gun-owning households own an average of 6 to 9 firearms. Gun hoarding is a thing in America. Third, studies indicate that about 75% of all gun-owners are white (ANES 2012 Time Series Study), so white representation among gun-owners is much higher than among the general population. Finally, with the exception of Switzerland which also has universal military service requirements, no other developed country has such a heavily armed civilian population: this is clearly an American phenomenon, a facet of American exceptionalism. So, why do so many people, especially white Americans have such an attachment to guns?

Fear of crime is a tempting answer. Surveys say that 48% of gun-owners cite “protection” as the key reason for owning guns, up from 26% in 1999. However, crime today is down compared to the 1990s. According to the Department of Justice, in 1991 the homicide rate was 9.8; in 2010 it had dropped to 4.8. Not only has violent crime declined, but whites are the group with the lowest victimization rate. From 1980 to 2008, on average, there were 4.5 white but 27.8 Black victims of violence per 100,000 Americans. Add to that the fact that white neighborhoods typically have better policing than Black neighborhoods and fear of crime loses its explanatory appeal. African-Americans who have good reason to fear gun violence are far less likely to own guns.

Former slave, Fredrick Douglass offers a different answer: there is “something ennobling in the possession of arms,” he said in 1863 (Emberton, 2013). For a great many white people, guns are important not for their practical utility but for the image they convey and the feelings they generate in their owners. In short, guns are not about duck hunting, or even crime protection; guns are about respect.

The cultural importance of the firearm goes back to the Revolution and the myth of the citizen-soldier. Despite General Washington’s contrary opinion, the rhetoric of the era endowed the Patriots with three virtues: independence, armed masculinity, and moral righteousness. Since the new Republic explicitly rejected religion, heredity, or ethnicity as the bases for citizenship, these values became the markers of the “true” American. The righteous man who was ready to fight for liberty deserved the title of citizen.

Heroic as this myth was, American history shows that it served to justify racial hierarchies. The armed protector of liberty was a white man. As historian Francois Furstenberg has argued, liberty and resistance went together only for whites. It is not that Blacks haven’t fought in every war including the Revolution. They have. But the double standard of American culture, present to this day in modified form, suggested that an armed Black man was a criminal. In his horrified response to the slave rebellion in San Domingue, Thomas Jefferson makes it clear that slaves fighting to rid themselves of masters are not patriots, but murderous savages.

Douglass hoped service in the Union Army would elevate Blacks to the status of citizenship. He was only partially right. Armed self-defense never meant the same thing for Blacks and whites as the resistance to Black militia attests. Only white gun ownership reflected virtue; Black gun ownership spoke of violence. More recent case in point: the horrified white reactions to claims of armed self-defense by the Black Panthers in the 1960s.

Since the 1960s, reactionary movements have interpreted minority groups’ efforts to ensure equality as an assault on the status of whites. Conservative intellectuals argued that race-conscious programs disadvantage whites, and many whites agree: 37% of all whites, but in a 2015 UIC Survey on Gun Control, 47% of white gun-owners say that the government “does too much” for Blacks. Experimental evidence strengthen the correlational results by showing that exposure to pictures of Blacks depresses support for gun control among whites (Filindra and Kaplan, 2015).

Given that firearms carry such a strong association with notions of virtuous white citizenship, it is not a surprise that white Americans who feel socially devalued and who attribute the change in their status to unfair gains by Blacks would see in firearms a symbolic way to regain respect: to be seen as noble and virtuous citizens. In this sense, gun rights are arguably the most persistent vestige of white privilege.

About the Author: Alexandra Filindra, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Filindra and co-author Noah Kaplan were awarded the Lucius Barker Award at the 2016 MPSA Conference for the best paper on a topic investigating race or ethnicity and politics and honoring the spirit and work of Professor Barker for their work on “Racial Resentment and Whites’ Gun Policy Preferences in Contemporary America”.

The following is part of a series of posts written by 2016 MPSA award recipients highlighting outstanding research presented at previous MPSA annual conferences.

What power do religious authorities exert over people? While the traditional role of churches and clergy as nurturers of social capital has declined with the secularization of the West, the importance of religious actors in large-scale social and political mobilization in the non-Western world has been steadily increasing for many years. Both government policy campaigns and anti-government protests find themselves sinking or swimming depending on their ability to “connect with the society… [and] maximize the use of traditional and religious leaders.” Muslim clerics serve as the backbone of social service and militant fundraising for organizations such as Hezbollah and the Mahdi Army in Iraq, and conversely, the ‘de-radicalization’ of terrorists. Clearly, religious authorities wield unusual influence over people; but what this influence is and how it works is a mystery.

One possible explanation for the effectiveness of religious authorities as mobilizers may be that especially charismatic and persuasive individuals are overrepresented in this profession. Ruhollah Khomeini may have personality traits that would have made him a powerful a leader, whether as Grand Ayatollah or as a secular authority figure. However, personal characteristics aside, being perceived as a religious authority may imbue an individual with unique psychological powers. The most obvious one may be that religious authorities are implicitly associated with God, and hence automatically remind people of higher ideals, being perfectly observed by God’s omnipresence, and after-life rewards and punishments. This is far more powerful than an alternative channel, which is that religious authorities influence people by virtue of their position as community leaders and enforcers of norms.

Investigating these competing hypotheses is difficult with existing data. Personal characteristics that distinguish religious authorities and civilian authorities are difficult to categorize, let alone measure. In situations like this, where counterfactuals are often impossible to establish with real-world data, experimentation plays a central role. A few studies manipulate the identity of the deliverer of a message to be from a religious authority in writing, through video, or in the form of a picture. However, “the most subtle dynamics ..[on].. how relative status is signaled and established depend on the resources made available by face to face interaction and a shared physical setting.”

We present the first experiment we know of to do just this. In our experiment, a Muslim cleric in Kabul, Afghanistan appears in person to solicit contributions for a public good (a hospital) from low income day laborers under two experimental conditions: while dressed as a civilian (Civilian) and while dressed as a cleric (Cleric). By having an actual cleric interact face-to-face with the subjects, we isolate the additional impact of his positional authority after preserving the multidimensional characteristics (speech, gesture, etc.) of an individual that would self-select into this high-status position. Indeed, the cleric’s distinction is apparent even in his civilian clothing: 80% of subjects who guessed his profession stated professions of secular authority.

We find that people are far less likely to contribute nothing (0 AFN) to the hospital when the solicitor is dressed in his clerical garments (17%) compared to when he is dressed as a civilian (50%) (see Figure 1). However, average contributions are equal across the conditions because while more people give when asked by the cleric, (a) they give minimally (10 AFN) and (b) the decrease in conditional amount is especially pronounced among those with formal education. While civilians do not wield verbatim quotations of scripture as a motivating and legitimating tool, clerics do. We therefore add a third treatment, the Cleric+Scripture treatment, which proceeds identically to the Cleric treatment except for an addition of a short reading from the Qur’an at the end of the solicitation script reminding subjects that “Allah loves good-doers”. The use of religious text is among several known ways to explicitly prime religion in the experimental and behavioral literature, and consistent with this literature we find that conditional amount increases while the probability of giving remains high. As a result, average contributions in Cleric+Scripture are twice of that in the Civilian and Cleric conditions.

How should we explain this behavior? First and foremost, our evidence suggests that religious priming comes from the Qur’an, not the cleric. The increase in the intensive and extensive margins of giving that is observed in previous experiments with religious priming only occurs in our experiment with the addition of the scripture. Second, the increase in the propensity to contribute, coupled with the decrease in conditional contribution to the smallest possible denomination of 10 AFN, suggest that the day workers in our experiment were complying with the Islamic norm of sadaqah (charitable giving) in a way consistent with legalism, that is, an adherence to the letter but not the spirit of the norm. In other words, religious positional authority appears to place the cleric as a legitimate leader of the Muslim community, but without the rhetorical tools of scripture, not one that is implicitly associated with an omnipresent God (otherwise, this would suggest that while God can observe whether you give, he apparently cannot count). Third, those who are formally educated appears to be less receptive to religious positional authority. Overall, our experiment illustrates the limits to the positional power of religious authorities and shows just how important holy scriptures can be as justification for the cleric’s exhortation or as a direct reminder that God is watching and rewarding the behavior that the cleric is encouraging.

About the Authors: Blog post submitted by Luke N. Condra, Mohammad Isaqzadeh, and Sera Linardi. Their research, “Clerics and Scriptures: Experimentally Disentangling the Influence of Religious Authority in Afghanistan” was named as a co-winner of the Kellogg/Notre Dame Award for best paper in comparative politics at the 2016 MPSA Conference.