Citizen-State Interactions in the Shadow of Conflict

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel explores interactions between citizens and the state under the shadow of violence and instability. The papers focus on arguably the two most important means through which citizens interact with the state, voting and contact with law enforcement. First, Aksoy, Tavits, and Menger address the effects of heavy-handed counterinsurgency operations on voter behavior. Drawing on data from Turkey, they show that subjecting citizens to curfews in the name of security may affect voter participation in ways that benefit the incumbent government. Three other papers address the state’s role in providing public safety, and the way in which conflict and instability affect citizens’ involvement in this process. Using novel data from the US, South Africa, and Haiti, Jung explores the rationale behind the state’s tolerance for extralegal lynchings even as it consolidates following the end of conflict. She argues that the government may allow extralegal “justice” to persist because these events disproportionately target political out-groups. Blair, Grossman, and Wilke test whether a community policing program popularized in Western countries can successfully increase citizens’ cooperation with the police in Uganda. Finally, Haim, Nanes, and Ravanilla explore the causes and consequences of police officers' misperceptions of civilian support for insurgents. Using surveys of both police officers and civilians in the Philippines, as well as administrative data measuring local insurgent strength, they show that police officers' beliefs about the extent of citizens' sympathy for insurgents varies wildly even within small areas, and argue that officers' misperceptions result from inadequate interactions with the citizens they aim to protect.

Together, these papers illuminate the multiple avenues through which citizens interact with the state, and the way a history of conflict and instability shapes these interactions. To do so, they draw on novel micro-level evidence from surveys, field experiments, and observational studies. Whereas three of the papers are limited in their analyses to a single country, the panel as a whole breaks free of this limitation by drawing on evidence from a diverse range of countries, allowing broader insights into citizen-state interactions across multiple contexts. Finally, the papers are tied together by their focus on justice, whether in the traditional sense of formal law enforcement by state institutions, an informal version carried out extralegaly by citizens with the state’s tacit approval, or through the suppression of anti-state violence using means which cause collateral damage in the form of suppressing democratic expression.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• Counterinsurgency and Voting - Deniz Aksoy, Washington University in St. Louis; Margit Tavits, Washington University in St. Louis; Andrew Menger, Washington University

• Lynching and Justice in Conflict and Post-Conflict Contexts - Danielle F. Jung, Emory University

• Community Policing and Public Trust - Robert A. Blair, Brown University; Guy Grossman, University of Pennsylvania; Anna Maria Wilke, Columbia University

• Know Your Enemy: Misinformation and Misperceptions in Counterinsurgency - Dotan A Haim, Dartmouth College; Matthew Nanes, Saint Louis University; Nico Ravanilla, University of California San Diego

Chair

• Jason Lyall Dartmouth College

Discussant

• Renard J. Sexton Emory University