Results for “hanania” 48 found
Wednesday assorted links
1. Sentences to ponder: “He’s in London with his girlfriend, in the apartment the Batman folks rented for him…’I went for a run around the park today,’ he says. ‘I’m so terrified of being, like, arrested. You’re allowed to run around here. But the terror I feel from it is quite extreme.’…I was so obsessed with watching Christopher Hitchens debates.”
2. The man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship.
4. “We find that talking about white privilege causes a major reduction in support for a politician.”
5. Leisure-enhancing technological change.
6. How are bookstores doing? (NYT)
Prejudice and foreign policy views
Scholars of foreign policy preference formation have accepted what Rathbun et al. (2016) call the “vertical hierarchy model,” which says that policy attitudes are determined by more abstract moral ideas about right and wrong. This paper turns this idea on its head by introducing the prejudice first model, arguing that foreign policy preferences and orientations are in part driven by attitudes towards the groups being affected by specific policies. Three experiments are used to test the utility of this framework. First, when conservatives heard about Muslims killing Christians, as opposed to the opposite scenario, they were more likely to support a humanitarian intervention and agree that the United States has a moral obligation to help those persecuted by their governments. Liberals showed no religious preference. When the relevant identity group was race, however, liberals were more likely to want to help blacks persecuted by whites, while conservatives showed no racial bias. In contrast, the degree of persecution mattered relatively little to respondents in either experiment. In another experiment, conservatives adopted more isolationist policies after reading a text about the country becoming more liberal, as opposed to a paragraph that said the United States was a relatively conservative country. The treatment showed the opposite effect on liberals, although the results fell just short of statistical significance. While not necessarily contradicting the vertical hierarchy model, the results indicate that prejudices and biases not only help influence foreign policy attitudes, but moral perceptions of right and wrong in international politics.
That is from Richard Hanania and Robert Trager. File under “Mood Affiliation…”
A Time to Kill, A Time to Heal
Why do governments sometimes engage in mass killings? Mass killings could help governments to suppress the opposition–that seems obvious–but it’s also true that mass killings can create blowback and further stiffen the opposition’s resolve. Uzonyi and Hanania offer a simple theory and some clarification:
We argue that government mass killing during war reduces opportunities for the opposition to return to military conflict in the future. This allows for longer periods of post-conflict peace. However, government atrocities that begin after the end of a civil war create new grievances without diminishing the ability of opponents to fight. This makes a faster return to conflict more likely. Statistical analysis of all civil wars between 1946 and 2006 strongly supports our arguments, even when we account for selection effects regarding when governments are more likely to engage in mass killing. These results reveal that both during-war and post-war tactics influence civil war recurrence, but that the same tactic can produce different effects depending on the timing of its use.
Essentially the authors are arguing that civil wars sometimes end when one side decisively wins. Not surprising but how about this for an uncomfortable thought:
We stress that mass killing is a grizzly and morally appalling
tactic. But it does appear to keep a country at peace for a
longer duration once a conflict ends. If the international
community disrupts these effects of mass killing, it may be
inadvertently increasing the likelihood that civil war will recur. Thus, if the international community chooses to intervene in conflicts to protect civilians, member states must also
be willing to remain in the country over the long term to
help the government and opposition groups refrain from returning to war. Unfortunately, few states have demonstrated
an appetite for such long-term commitments.