Eva Wegner | University College Dublin (original) (raw)
Papers by Eva Wegner
This article investigates accountability in South Africa's dominant party system by studying how ... more This article investigates accountability in South Africa's dominant party system by studying how the African National Congress (ANC) reacts to electoral incentives at the local level. It compares the ANC's degree of responsiveness to voters across municipalities with different levels of political competition. The analysis focuses on whether and under which conditions the ANC is more likely to renominate better quality municipal councillors. It examines the relationship between renomination as ANC municipal councillor and local government performanceas measured by voter signals, service delivery and audit outcomes. The results show that the ANC does indeed adapt its behaviour to electoral incentives. In municipalities where the ANC has larger margins of victory, performance matters little for renomination. In contrast, in municipalities with higher electoral competition, local government performance is strongly correlated with renomination. These results suggest the need to expand dominant party research to topics of voter responsiveness and sub-national behaviour.
Studies of the Middle East and North Africa have very often relied on qualitative methodologies t... more Studies of the Middle East and North Africa have very often relied on qualitative methodologies to understand and explain the politics of the region. In fact it could be argued that Middle East specialists have tended to shy away purposefully from engaging with quantitative methods because of the perceived ‘exceptionalism’ of the region in terms of the gathering and reliability of hard data. This article makes the case for increasing engagement with quantitative methodologies in order for studies on the Middle East to better 'speak' to comparative politics more broadly. Far from downplaying the significance and contribution of qualitative methods, this article encourages scholars to integrate them with quantitative methods that have been more recently developed to provide a fuller picture of politics in the region.
This article analyzes the performance of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) in Moro... more This article analyzes the performance of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) in Moroccan local politics from 2003 to 2009, using a variety of data sources including interviews, municipal budgets, and audit reports. We find that the PJD’s campaign and candidates were significantly different from Moroccan political norms. The outcomes of audits and budget patterns show governance in towns where the PJD was elected differed only in those where the party had high electoral support in 2003, allowing it to govern with a small coalition
This paper presents a survey experiment in South Africa that focuses on the role of mobilization ... more This paper presents a survey experiment in South Africa that focuses on the role of mobilization for demand for redistribution. Previous literature has found that providing information on inequality raises concerns about inequality but does not lead to a change in tax preferences. We argue that mobilization might provide the missing link between information and political behavior regarding demand for redistribution. We operationalize mobilization from an individual perspective as the belief that a decrease in inequality is a feasible enterprise. If this belief is absent, information about inequality might simply increase the pessimism of respondents and remain inconsequential for policy preferences. We test this idea with a survey experiment in two townships in Cape Town, which includes three treatments. The first treatment gives simply information on local inequality. The second treatment provides information on inequality in comparative perspective, including information on the (much lower inequality) in neighboring countries. The third is elite support for redistribution with video messages of South African leaders about the need to fight inequality. Consistent with previous literature, we find that information on local inequality increases concern for inequality but has no effects on tax preferences. Information on inequality in comparative perspective and the videos shake the belief that a decrease in inequality is feasible and consequently lead to a change in tax preferences. While the mechanism regarding information on inequality in comparative perspective is as * Corresponding Author: eva.wegner@giga-hamburg.de † We would like to acknowledge the funding of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme through the "NOPOOR -Enhancing knowledge for renewed policies against poverty" project. We would also like to thank Jan Schenk for his feedback on our questionnaire and treatment design throughout this project and for the diligent work of his survey company ikapadata. expected, the one for the videos is puzzling: videos make people believe that inequality is more, instead of less, inevitable, and this leads to lower tax preferences. We conjecture that this is due to a lack of credibility of the leaders considered which makes viewers more pessimistic and has a demobilizing effect.
Electoral Studies, 2014
In this paper, we estimate the effect of the legal threshold on the number of parties and decompo... more In this paper, we estimate the effect of the legal threshold on the number of parties and decompose it into a mechanical and a psychological effect. We study the case of Morocco, whose local elections afford a rare opportunity to uncover the causal effect of the legal threshold, using a differences-in-differences approach. Our results show a large effect of the legal threshold on the number of parties. We find a large psychological effect in absolute terms: a 3% increase in the legal threshold leaves almost one effective party out of the council for purely strategic reasons. We conjecture that this large effect is due to the lack of institutionalization and programmaticness of most Moroccan parties.
This paper studies the causal effect of electoral systems on the performance of clientelistic vs.... more This paper studies the causal effect of electoral systems on the performance of clientelistic vs. programmatic parties. We argue that, contrary to majoritarian systems, proportional systems disfavor clientelistic parties as voters can hardly be pivotal for electing their local patron. We test this insight using data from local elections in Morocco from 2003 and 2009. We use a regression discontinuity approach exploiting the fact that the law stipulates a population threshold below which the system is majoritarian and above which it is proportional. Results
Based on an original dataset of merged electoral and census data, this article is a study of elec... more Based on an original dataset of merged electoral and census data, this article is a study of electoral support for the Islamist Party in Morocco in the 2002 and 2007 elections. It differentiates between the clientelistic, grievance and horizontal network type of supporters. We disentangle these profiles empirically on the basis of the role of education, wealth and exclusion for Islamist votes. We find no evidence of the clientelistic profile, but a shift from grievance in 2002 to a horizontal network profile in 2007. World Values Survey individual level data are used as a robustness check, yielding similar results. Qualitative evidence on a changing mobilization pattern of the party between 2002 and 2007 supports our conclusions.
The Journal of North African Studies, 2006
This article examines how authoritarian elites manage the quest for political participation of mo... more This article examines how authoritarian elites manage the quest for political participation of moderate Islamist groups in view of securing regime persistence. Through a comparative analysis of the logics of two cases—the Moroccan Movement of Unity and Reform (MUR) and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood—it aims to understand the key factors accounting for differences in form and evolution of the respective containment strategies. The MUR was formally included into parliament and electoral processes. In contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood remains illegal, was tolerated on an informal basis only and subject to a repressive backlash in the 1990s. Therefore, whereas both regimes have yielded to the movements' demands for political participation, the mechanisms (formal vs. informal) and the developments (protracted vs. reversed) show marked differences. Starting from the assumption that the chosen mechanisms result from the rulers' risks perception, the comparison shows that the rulers' choices are predominantly shaped by the institutional setting of the respective authoritarian systems (monarchic vs. presidential) and influenced by the strength of an Islamist organisation relative to other opposition forces. As to the different developments, it is argued that continuity or the reversal of an inclusivist experiment is the result of the ruler's assessment of the success of the experiment. Inclusion is continued if it contributes to regime stability through the Islamists' compliance with the rules of the game or, at least, if it does not impact negatively on the latter. If, instead, the Islamist challenge increases over time, inclusion is abandoned and replaced by a largely repressive containment strategy.
Trends in inequality, poverty, and redistribution in post-apartheid South Africa have received in... more Trends in inequality, poverty, and redistribution in post-apartheid South Africa have received intense attention especially in terms of measuring inequality and poverty levels and the proximate causes of these levels. We review this literature and find a set of established trends. Inequality levels have increased but the face of inequality has changed with present-day inequality displaying a lessened racial make-up than under apartheid. In contrast, poverty has decreased but is still bears the strong racial makers of apartheid. The labour market continues to drive inequality. A related literature has concentrated on fiscal redistribution in South Africa after the transition, arguing that social policies are well targeted towards the poor with social grants being central in lifting people out of poverty. At the same time, these policies have not succeeded in reversing inequality trends and in providing equal opportunities for all South Africans. To bulk of paper probes this further. We use fiscal incidence analysis to show that redistribution increased slightly since 1993, that this redistribution is higher than in Latin America but far below European levels. Second, looking at spending for all social services we find a mixed picture. There has been an increase in spending since the end of apartheid on social policy and for a number of social policy items in the progressivity of this spending. At the same time, spending has not increased as a percentage of GDP and has become less progressive for social grants. Finally, we examine education policy in more detail. We find that the importance of tertiary education, as a predictor of income has increased considerably whereas individuals with low or incomplete secondary education were worse off in 2008, compared to 1993. Second, we find that state spending on education has increased since the early 1990s. The spending gap between rich and poor provinces has become much narrower but spending equality has not been reached. The academic achievements of students display high inequality, compared to international standards and there is also evidence that the capabilities of students have decreased, rather than increased, suggesting that increased spending has not translated into an increase in the quality of education provision.
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2011
This contribution studies the different preferences of Moroccan Islamists and leftists for cooper... more This contribution studies the different preferences of Moroccan Islamists and leftists for cooperating with each other. The Islamist Party of Justice and Development (PJD) has been actively seeking an alliance with the leftist Socialist Union of Popular Forces (USFP) since 2007. The USFP's national leadership has avoided any form of cooperation with the Islamists at the national level, but had to tolerate government coalitions at the local level. We find that the most important driver behind the USFP's reluctance to ally with the Islamists is its co-optation. The asymmetry in electoral strength and differences in the type of electoral support the two parties enjoy also appear to be important reasons behind the different party preferences. For the PJD, its superior electoral support and the higher degree of programmatic support it enjoys suggest that it expects to be successful in democratic elections, while the opposite seems to be the case for the USFP. Ideology, by contrast, was found to be of little importance in determining the positions of the national PJD or USFP leadership towards cross-party cooperation. The analysis is based on original field research conducted in Morocco and on data from the World Values Survey.
This paper evaluates the German, UK, and US approaches to dealing with research ethics in the soc... more This paper evaluates the German, UK, and US approaches to dealing with research ethics in the social sciences. It focuses 1) on the extent to which these research ethic frameworks protect the key rights of research subjects and 2) the extent to to which they take into account the methodology and approaches used in social science and do not simply emulate those of the natural sciences.
The Journal of North African Studies, 2009
This article studies if and under which circumstances Western support to regimes in the Middle Ea... more This article studies if and under which circumstances Western support to regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is contingent on concerns for political and civil rights. Using foreign aid as a proxy for support, we compare the role of political and civil rights with the role of different geopolitical and economic factors for aid allocation. We analyse
Cooperation between the European Union and the United States regarding the Iranian nuclear file h... more Cooperation between the European Union and the United States regarding the Iranian nuclear file has evolved from an implicit good-cop-bad-cop type of role distribution towards an approach where -at least from an Iranian perspective -Americans and Europeans join in the latter role. At the time of writing, the EU-3 and the US were both pressuring for a more explicit language in the UN Security Council whereas Russia and China had taken on the role of the friendly negotiators. However, despite the more coordinated approach of the Europeans and the Americans an elaborate "transatlantic strategy for Iran" has not emerged.
This article investigates accountability in South Africa's dominant party system by studying how ... more This article investigates accountability in South Africa's dominant party system by studying how the African National Congress (ANC) reacts to electoral incentives at the local level. It compares the ANC's degree of responsiveness to voters across municipalities with different levels of political competition. The analysis focuses on whether and under which conditions the ANC is more likely to renominate better quality municipal councillors. It examines the relationship between renomination as ANC municipal councillor and local government performanceas measured by voter signals, service delivery and audit outcomes. The results show that the ANC does indeed adapt its behaviour to electoral incentives. In municipalities where the ANC has larger margins of victory, performance matters little for renomination. In contrast, in municipalities with higher electoral competition, local government performance is strongly correlated with renomination. These results suggest the need to expand dominant party research to topics of voter responsiveness and sub-national behaviour.
Studies of the Middle East and North Africa have very often relied on qualitative methodologies t... more Studies of the Middle East and North Africa have very often relied on qualitative methodologies to understand and explain the politics of the region. In fact it could be argued that Middle East specialists have tended to shy away purposefully from engaging with quantitative methods because of the perceived ‘exceptionalism’ of the region in terms of the gathering and reliability of hard data. This article makes the case for increasing engagement with quantitative methodologies in order for studies on the Middle East to better 'speak' to comparative politics more broadly. Far from downplaying the significance and contribution of qualitative methods, this article encourages scholars to integrate them with quantitative methods that have been more recently developed to provide a fuller picture of politics in the region.
This article analyzes the performance of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) in Moro... more This article analyzes the performance of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) in Moroccan local politics from 2003 to 2009, using a variety of data sources including interviews, municipal budgets, and audit reports. We find that the PJD’s campaign and candidates were significantly different from Moroccan political norms. The outcomes of audits and budget patterns show governance in towns where the PJD was elected differed only in those where the party had high electoral support in 2003, allowing it to govern with a small coalition
This paper presents a survey experiment in South Africa that focuses on the role of mobilization ... more This paper presents a survey experiment in South Africa that focuses on the role of mobilization for demand for redistribution. Previous literature has found that providing information on inequality raises concerns about inequality but does not lead to a change in tax preferences. We argue that mobilization might provide the missing link between information and political behavior regarding demand for redistribution. We operationalize mobilization from an individual perspective as the belief that a decrease in inequality is a feasible enterprise. If this belief is absent, information about inequality might simply increase the pessimism of respondents and remain inconsequential for policy preferences. We test this idea with a survey experiment in two townships in Cape Town, which includes three treatments. The first treatment gives simply information on local inequality. The second treatment provides information on inequality in comparative perspective, including information on the (much lower inequality) in neighboring countries. The third is elite support for redistribution with video messages of South African leaders about the need to fight inequality. Consistent with previous literature, we find that information on local inequality increases concern for inequality but has no effects on tax preferences. Information on inequality in comparative perspective and the videos shake the belief that a decrease in inequality is feasible and consequently lead to a change in tax preferences. While the mechanism regarding information on inequality in comparative perspective is as * Corresponding Author: eva.wegner@giga-hamburg.de † We would like to acknowledge the funding of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme through the "NOPOOR -Enhancing knowledge for renewed policies against poverty" project. We would also like to thank Jan Schenk for his feedback on our questionnaire and treatment design throughout this project and for the diligent work of his survey company ikapadata. expected, the one for the videos is puzzling: videos make people believe that inequality is more, instead of less, inevitable, and this leads to lower tax preferences. We conjecture that this is due to a lack of credibility of the leaders considered which makes viewers more pessimistic and has a demobilizing effect.
Electoral Studies, 2014
In this paper, we estimate the effect of the legal threshold on the number of parties and decompo... more In this paper, we estimate the effect of the legal threshold on the number of parties and decompose it into a mechanical and a psychological effect. We study the case of Morocco, whose local elections afford a rare opportunity to uncover the causal effect of the legal threshold, using a differences-in-differences approach. Our results show a large effect of the legal threshold on the number of parties. We find a large psychological effect in absolute terms: a 3% increase in the legal threshold leaves almost one effective party out of the council for purely strategic reasons. We conjecture that this large effect is due to the lack of institutionalization and programmaticness of most Moroccan parties.
This paper studies the causal effect of electoral systems on the performance of clientelistic vs.... more This paper studies the causal effect of electoral systems on the performance of clientelistic vs. programmatic parties. We argue that, contrary to majoritarian systems, proportional systems disfavor clientelistic parties as voters can hardly be pivotal for electing their local patron. We test this insight using data from local elections in Morocco from 2003 and 2009. We use a regression discontinuity approach exploiting the fact that the law stipulates a population threshold below which the system is majoritarian and above which it is proportional. Results
Based on an original dataset of merged electoral and census data, this article is a study of elec... more Based on an original dataset of merged electoral and census data, this article is a study of electoral support for the Islamist Party in Morocco in the 2002 and 2007 elections. It differentiates between the clientelistic, grievance and horizontal network type of supporters. We disentangle these profiles empirically on the basis of the role of education, wealth and exclusion for Islamist votes. We find no evidence of the clientelistic profile, but a shift from grievance in 2002 to a horizontal network profile in 2007. World Values Survey individual level data are used as a robustness check, yielding similar results. Qualitative evidence on a changing mobilization pattern of the party between 2002 and 2007 supports our conclusions.
The Journal of North African Studies, 2006
This article examines how authoritarian elites manage the quest for political participation of mo... more This article examines how authoritarian elites manage the quest for political participation of moderate Islamist groups in view of securing regime persistence. Through a comparative analysis of the logics of two cases—the Moroccan Movement of Unity and Reform (MUR) and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood—it aims to understand the key factors accounting for differences in form and evolution of the respective containment strategies. The MUR was formally included into parliament and electoral processes. In contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood remains illegal, was tolerated on an informal basis only and subject to a repressive backlash in the 1990s. Therefore, whereas both regimes have yielded to the movements' demands for political participation, the mechanisms (formal vs. informal) and the developments (protracted vs. reversed) show marked differences. Starting from the assumption that the chosen mechanisms result from the rulers' risks perception, the comparison shows that the rulers' choices are predominantly shaped by the institutional setting of the respective authoritarian systems (monarchic vs. presidential) and influenced by the strength of an Islamist organisation relative to other opposition forces. As to the different developments, it is argued that continuity or the reversal of an inclusivist experiment is the result of the ruler's assessment of the success of the experiment. Inclusion is continued if it contributes to regime stability through the Islamists' compliance with the rules of the game or, at least, if it does not impact negatively on the latter. If, instead, the Islamist challenge increases over time, inclusion is abandoned and replaced by a largely repressive containment strategy.
Trends in inequality, poverty, and redistribution in post-apartheid South Africa have received in... more Trends in inequality, poverty, and redistribution in post-apartheid South Africa have received intense attention especially in terms of measuring inequality and poverty levels and the proximate causes of these levels. We review this literature and find a set of established trends. Inequality levels have increased but the face of inequality has changed with present-day inequality displaying a lessened racial make-up than under apartheid. In contrast, poverty has decreased but is still bears the strong racial makers of apartheid. The labour market continues to drive inequality. A related literature has concentrated on fiscal redistribution in South Africa after the transition, arguing that social policies are well targeted towards the poor with social grants being central in lifting people out of poverty. At the same time, these policies have not succeeded in reversing inequality trends and in providing equal opportunities for all South Africans. To bulk of paper probes this further. We use fiscal incidence analysis to show that redistribution increased slightly since 1993, that this redistribution is higher than in Latin America but far below European levels. Second, looking at spending for all social services we find a mixed picture. There has been an increase in spending since the end of apartheid on social policy and for a number of social policy items in the progressivity of this spending. At the same time, spending has not increased as a percentage of GDP and has become less progressive for social grants. Finally, we examine education policy in more detail. We find that the importance of tertiary education, as a predictor of income has increased considerably whereas individuals with low or incomplete secondary education were worse off in 2008, compared to 1993. Second, we find that state spending on education has increased since the early 1990s. The spending gap between rich and poor provinces has become much narrower but spending equality has not been reached. The academic achievements of students display high inequality, compared to international standards and there is also evidence that the capabilities of students have decreased, rather than increased, suggesting that increased spending has not translated into an increase in the quality of education provision.
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2011
This contribution studies the different preferences of Moroccan Islamists and leftists for cooper... more This contribution studies the different preferences of Moroccan Islamists and leftists for cooperating with each other. The Islamist Party of Justice and Development (PJD) has been actively seeking an alliance with the leftist Socialist Union of Popular Forces (USFP) since 2007. The USFP's national leadership has avoided any form of cooperation with the Islamists at the national level, but had to tolerate government coalitions at the local level. We find that the most important driver behind the USFP's reluctance to ally with the Islamists is its co-optation. The asymmetry in electoral strength and differences in the type of electoral support the two parties enjoy also appear to be important reasons behind the different party preferences. For the PJD, its superior electoral support and the higher degree of programmatic support it enjoys suggest that it expects to be successful in democratic elections, while the opposite seems to be the case for the USFP. Ideology, by contrast, was found to be of little importance in determining the positions of the national PJD or USFP leadership towards cross-party cooperation. The analysis is based on original field research conducted in Morocco and on data from the World Values Survey.
This paper evaluates the German, UK, and US approaches to dealing with research ethics in the soc... more This paper evaluates the German, UK, and US approaches to dealing with research ethics in the social sciences. It focuses 1) on the extent to which these research ethic frameworks protect the key rights of research subjects and 2) the extent to to which they take into account the methodology and approaches used in social science and do not simply emulate those of the natural sciences.
The Journal of North African Studies, 2009
This article studies if and under which circumstances Western support to regimes in the Middle Ea... more This article studies if and under which circumstances Western support to regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is contingent on concerns for political and civil rights. Using foreign aid as a proxy for support, we compare the role of political and civil rights with the role of different geopolitical and economic factors for aid allocation. We analyse
Cooperation between the European Union and the United States regarding the Iranian nuclear file h... more Cooperation between the European Union and the United States regarding the Iranian nuclear file has evolved from an implicit good-cop-bad-cop type of role distribution towards an approach where -at least from an Iranian perspective -Americans and Europeans join in the latter role. At the time of writing, the EU-3 and the US were both pressuring for a more explicit language in the UN Security Council whereas Russia and China had taken on the role of the friendly negotiators. However, despite the more coordinated approach of the Europeans and the Americans an elaborate "transatlantic strategy for Iran" has not emerged.