Lansing/Lee 22-23

Many authoritarian regimes use policy-based strategies of social control instead of more coercive tools like repression. When these regimes transition to democracy, do authoritarian successors pay a political price for such policies? This paper examines the political cost of one common authoritarian policy of social control – land settlement schemes – in Spain. The Franco dictatorship initiated a decades-long program to ameliorate land pressure by resettling excess rural labor in hundreds of new government-created towns in colonization zones throughout the country. This paper examines post-democratization voting patterns in municipalities containing new towns compared to a counterfactual set of proximate similar municipalities that were also in government-created colonization zones. I find that land settlement caused a backlash once Spain returned to democracy: voters disproportionately supported the left at the expense of the regime’s successor parties. I attribute this to a legacy of authoritarian political and economic oversight and manipulation in regime-created towns.

We develop and test a theory regarding the extent to which individual citizens base their expressed foreign policy preferences on available information about the preferences of their co-nationals and we seek to understand to what extent (mis)information about public opinion shapes both citizens' private preferences and the views they feel comfortable voicing in public. Public expressions of policy preferences are important because they reinforce others' perceptions of majority opinion; if citizens censor the views they express publicly, this could create a potentially false impression of the policies that are thought to be consistent with national identification. Such a pattern might be observed during periods when national identification is strongest (e.g., during foreign policy crises). Moreover, perceptions of public opinion are inherently manipulable by opinion leaders and the mass media, which can therefore shape policy preferences by cultivating (mis)perceptions about others' foreign policy preferences, thereby fueling a cycle of conformity. We explore whether perceptions of public opinion in the midst of a nationalist upsurge amplify group conformism and whether they can stimulate both escalation and de-escalation during periods of crisis.

In this paper, I investigate the effects of group acronyms as heuristic devices among financial investors. I analyze the consequences of the narratively constructed categorization into the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). I suggest and test the hypothesis that investors use categories as a heuristic shorthand which, in turn, affects their allocation decisions. I argue that this is due to two main behavioral tendencies on the part of investors: the representativeness bias and the availability bias. The paper examines the process through which these countries came to be grouped together in international media and then explores the contagion effect in sovereign bond markets during the period 2004-2020. Unlike other investment acronyms (e.g. PIIGS), the BRICS acronym contains a positive connotation. Consistent with this interpretation, I show how the number of articles containing the acronym BRICS in reference only to the other countries in the group decreases the bond spreads of a given country beyond what political conditions and economic fundamentals would predict. The results show that Brazil, Russia and, to a lesser extent, India have reaped substantial benefits from being labeled as BRICS. Consistent with the theoretical expectations, the heuristic BRICS effect is stronger when investors face greater uncertainty, when international capital is scarce, and when the country in question is more dependent on external financing.