Power in Autonomy: The Political Strategy of Constructive Resistance
Book Summary:
The book develops a theory of nonviolent resistance in closed societies that has less to do with “power in numbers” and more with power in building the state from below. In repressive contexts, where mass mobilization is not possible to sustain, nonviolent action can generate power by focusing on public service provision. By providing public services to those most in need, the resistance generates power through autonomy and self-sufficiency in six ways. First, providing goods to citizens directly implements the political project of the resistance at the local level, whether it is alleviating suffering, creating jobs, ending hunger, empowering young people, bringing closure and accountability to the victims of the regime, among many others.
Second, public service provision, such as soup kitchens and private clinics, also generates power by ending the relationship of dependence that the citizens have with the repressive state. Removing people’s material dependence on the state means that citizens are more likely to make independent decisions about their support for the regime in power. Citizens will also be more likely to join the resistance because they will have less to lose when they no longer acquiesce with the government’s requirements for assistance.
Third, by providing goods and services like founding think tanks and developing other job opportunities, the resistance can create livelihoods to a class of activists, organizers, and resistance leaders, who would otherwise lose their jobs or be in exile. In closed societies, cohorts of activists, community organizers, intellectuals, thought leaders and politicians are lost due to physical repression, exile, and the process of re-directing their careers to survive. A movement has the potential to grow stronger if these individuals remain in the community, knitting the social fabric, and building the resistance.
The fourth, fifth and sixth mechanisms for building power through constructive resistance are psychological in nature. By effectively providing goods and services, the resistance shifts the reference point for citizens: they show that it is possible to have jobs, to have food on the table, and a good education. Changing psychological reference points is likely to go along with shifting expectations: citizens might then require more of the state given that the resistance could fill the gaps of the state with fewer resources.
Finally, receiving public services from the opposition reduces the uncertainty that people might have about the opposition achieving power in the future. If the resistance demonstrates that it can govern and implement their political project, they are demonstrating important qualities about how they are likely to rule when they are in power, alleviating fears that an unknown quantity is worse than a bad known one.
The Construction of Quantitative Evidence in Political Science: A Turn to Practice
(with P. M. Aronow, Tommaso Bardelli, Josh Kalla, and Hilton Simmet)
Book under contract with Cambridge University Press
Book Summary:
Political science is a massive and diverse field. It is concerned with understanding the institutions and behaviors that constitute public life and the practices of government. The field is increasingly concerned with its ‘scientific’ aspect, borrowing tools and methods developed in the natural (and especially medical and biological) sciences. This turn has directed our attention to transparency. Transparency is a particular problem for political science because of the breadth and diversity of the discipline. Even within subfields with seemingly strong research norms, these norms may not be as strong as they appear and are hard to enforce. This project identifies the current status of transparency in quantitative political science and challenges the discipline to do better by identifying what can be done to improve its standards. In order to improve the discipline we believe we must first examine political science in practice.