Response to John Yasuda’s Review of <i>Food and Power: Regime Type, Agricultural Policy, and Political Stability</i>

Thomson, Henry

doi:10.1017/s1537592720001188

Cited by 4 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…6 While urban citizens likely favor government interventions to keep food cheap-particularly in the developing world, where food purchases constitute a critical component of overall expenditures-rural agents often engage in the production of agricultural goods, including food crops. By suppressing food prices, government agencies can improve urban consumers' real purchasing power but often do so at a cost to agricultural production's profitability (Ballard-Rosa 2016;Bates 1981;Thomson 2019;Wallace 2013). However, many democratic governments prop up the price of food crops grown by their rural farmers in order to protect their earnings, though this may drive up the market costs for such goods and thereby damage urban consumers' well-being.…”

Section: Distributional Conflict and Popular Opposition To Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, to the extent that governments possess finite resources, their agricultural policies tend to favor one group at the expense of the other. 7 This focus therefore allows us to identify geographically separable preferences over policy that are generally beneficial to one electoral bloc and costly to 4 For work that considers this dimension explicitly, see Ballard-Rosa (2020), Bates (1981), Harding (2012), Hendrix and Haggard (2015), Pierskalla (2011), Thomson (2019), andVarshney (1993). Glaeser and Steinberg (2017) analyze the link between urbanization and transitions to democracy.…”

Section: Distributional Conflict and Popular Opposition To Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…5 Some scholars (e.g., Bates 1981) argue that urban masses are more effective at pressuring politicians and are therefore treated more favorably. However, other work (Thomson 2019) argues that when the rural sector is dominated by landed elites, rural bias occurs. Many of the examples of this phenomenon come from Latin America, which is the region in which we test our argument, and this may therefore explain why our findings differ from the former findings.…”

Section: Distributional Conflict and Popular Opposition To Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Without loss of generality, we normalize the price of good x to unity. Given the importance of agricultural pricing policies in many political contexts (Ballard-Rosa 2016;Bates 1981;Pierskalla 2011;Thomson 2019;Wallace 2013), we focus on the government's policy choice that affects the domestic market price of food. This price is p = π + ϕ, where π captures the world price for agricultural products and f [ [f, f] represents the government's intervention in food prices (where f , 0 , f).…”

Section: Citizensmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thomson (2019) explains agricultural policy as a function of whether the urban or rural sector can better organize, whereas this bias is our independent variable, as we explain subsequently.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Geography of Democratic Discontent

Ballard-Rosa

Carnegie

Schonfeld

2022

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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Understanding the determinants of support for democracy remains at the heart of many puzzles in international and comparative political economy. A central but still unresolved topic in this literature is the conditions under which such support dissipates. To answer this question, this article focuses on distributional politics: since democratic leaders possess limited budgets but need to win elections, they often skew resources toward one politically influential sector, leading to more negative attitudes toward democracy among electorally ignored populations. In particular, we argue that governments often face a key political trade-off: whether to direct resources to the agricultural sector or to encourage urban development. After developing this argument in a formal model, we detail historical accounts that substantiate the mechanisms identified in the model. Finally, we provide cross-national quantitative evidence that discontent with democracy increases among geographic populations when governments disproportionately distribute resources toward other sectors.

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Section: Distributional Conflict and Popular Opposition To Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Distributional Conflict and Popular Opposition To Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Distributional Conflict and Popular Opposition To Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Citizensmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Geography of Democratic Discontent

Ballard-Rosa

Carnegie

Schonfeld

2022

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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Nutrition‐sensitive lockdowns: Conceptual framework and empirical insights from Africa during COVID‐19

Daum

Biesalski

Blaschke

et al. 2023

Development Policy Review

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Motivation Countries facing challenges of nutrition security confront a trade‐off when dealing with pandemics such as COVID‐19. Implementing lockdown measures, widely used worldwide, can help “flatten the curve” (of disease), but such measures may worsen nutrition security. Purpose We aim to identify and justify nutrition‐sensitive lockdown measures to reduce trade‐offs with nutrition security. Methods and approach We propose a conceptual framework which distinguishes eight lockdown measures and six pathways to nutrition security. To demonstrate the relevance of the pathways, we reviewed emerging literature on COVID‐19 and nutrition security. We analysed the content of 1,188 newspaper articles on lockdown effects in five African countries — Benin, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda and Zambia. Findings Some lockdown measures, such as closing workplaces and restricting movement, potentially worsen nutrition far more than others — banning events and public gatherings have far lesser impacts on nutrition. This can be seen from the framework, literature, and is supported by the analysis of newspaper reports in the five countries. Policy implications It is better when possible to test and trace disease than to lockdown. But when lockdowns are needed, then first recourse should be to measures that have few nutritional consequences, such as banning public events. When more drastic measures are necessary, look to mitigate nutritional harm by, for example, exempting farm labour from restrictions on movement, by replacing school meals with take‐home rations, and, above all, providing income support to households most affected and most vulnerable.

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Political Control

Hassan

Mattingly

Nugent

2022

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci.

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Political leaders use different tactics to ensure widespread compliance with state policies and to minimize resistance. Scholarship tends to treat different tactics individually, suggesting fundamental dissimilarities in underpinning logic and goals. We introduce political control as a concept that unifies these different tactics within a single framework and demonstrate the analytical utility of considering seemingly disparate strategies in conversation rather than in isolation. We synthesize a growing recent literature on political control, including innovative approaches to repression as well as studies of indoctrination, distribution, and infiltration. We argue that tactics of political control can be understood to vary along two primary dimensions: the level of violence and the materiality of rewards. We highlight recent inquiry into the downstream effects of political control. We conclude with a call for more research on political control that considers combinations of different tactics, across regime types, in a world where tolerance of violent repression is diminishing. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 25 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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Response to John Yasuda’s Review of Food and Power: Regime Type, Agricultural Policy, and Political Stability

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

The Geography of Democratic Discontent

The Geography of Democratic Discontent

Nutrition‐sensitive lockdowns: Conceptual framework and empirical insights from Africa during COVID‐19

Political Control

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