Distributive politics and institution-building in conflict and post-conflict settings are topics of significant relevance in the Middle East. Previous research suggests that clientelistic access to employment and public services shape subnational variation in political behavior during the outset of conflict. In turn, state attempts to construct institutions and new patterns of service provision may be shaped and constrained by legacies of conflict, the politics of previous regimes, and the emergence of non-state actors. In this panel, the authors address a diverse set of questions in three main conflict and post-conflict settings: Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. These papers ask: how do states engage in institution-building and service delivery in conflict and post-conflict settings? Under what conditions do these institution-building processes persist? Finally, how does public employment, a key distributive tool of clientelist authoritarian regimes, shape political behavior?
The papers draw on an array of methods and data sources, including an original experiment, extensive observational data from government, NGO, and non-governmental sources, satellite data on light emission, and in-depth qualitative research through interviews and primary source analysis. Two papers on Iraq and Syria emphasize the long-lasting effects of pre-conflict distributional strategies even following regime change in one case. The second set of papers explores the legacies of institutions and non-state actors brought to the fore during conflict itself on service provision. With populations across the Levant continuing to suffer the fallout of conflict--through decimated infrastructure, weak state capacity, and ongoing violence--these papers present novel and theoretically important contributions to topics with significant policy and scholarly implications.
Region and ethnicity are key drivers of distributive politics in clientelist regimes. Yet it is unclear how these distributive strategies may change over time, particularly in cases of social upheaval or mass internal displacement which shift local populations. This is a significant theoretical gap given the increasing prevalence of displacement and conflict in clientelistic states throughout the developing world. This project examines whether the state shifts patterns of distributive politics following war and social upheaval and if so, how? We argue that while new regimes may desire to shift resources away from their political rivals, these efforts are constrained by the targetability and excludability of public goods. We examine the case of local variation in public goods in Iraq following the US invasion to test our theory, using night lights data, survey data, and observational data from 1997 to 2013.
In post-conflict settings where state and non-state legal orders coexist within the same territory, what factors determine individual preferences among alternative providers of justice and order? Are some people more prone to favor legal pluralism versus believing in the legitimacy of a single legal system for all cases? Or does it depend on the type of crime committed? Through a survey experiment conducted in the Iraqi city of Mosul, where the population has long been exposed to three alternative justice systems–state, tribal, and Islamic–we explore the relationship between state legitimacy and support for non-state legal authorities. The experiment helps us to parse out who is most likely to prefer legal pluralism–the application of different types of laws to different types of situations–in contrast to others who believe in the legitimacy of a single legal system to decide all cases that come before the law. We also expect, among other hypotheses, that Iraqis who stayed in Mosul after the Islamic State (IS) arrived in June 2014 (“stayers”) are more likely to prefer non-state legal authorities, whether tribal or Islamic, over state legal authorities in comparison with those who fled to government–controlled areas (“leavers”). Whether the data support or disconfirm these hypotheses, the results will have important implications for efforts by governments to establish legitimacy in areas where their sovereignty has been challenged by non-state actors.
This article examines the consequences of center-periphery ties for local governance in Lebanon. It shows that strong ties to Lebanon’s governing regime – a multi-party cartel – became a necessary precondition to public goods provision following the country’s 15 year-long civil war. The article relies on qualitative evidence from 142 interviews conducted over several years of fieldwork in Lebanon. It employs a comparative case study of two urban municipalities, Sidon and Tripoli, with analogous pre-war politics and similar sectarian demographics. Using this case comparison and a shadow set of cases, it shows that the two cities experienced divergent types of war-era destruction, which shaped the ability of nascent parties to coopt local political institutions and elections. Party cartel-dominated cities were subsequently characterized, in the post-war era, by more effective mechanisms of candidate selection for municipal office. Parties select more reliably loyal agents to serve on their behalf in the local government, who then leverage partisan ties to provide public goods to their municipalities. The article also highlights the implications of party cartel control for local predation. It then discusses how even once-resistant local governments in Lebanon have gradually submitted to an equilibrium of party co-optation.
What shapes the geography of protest against single-party authoritarian regimes? Clientelistic theories argue that regimes use employment to co-opt state workers, such that towns with high levels of public employment should feature few anti-government protests. But regimes can also opt for repressive strategies that disincentivize the maintenance or limit the effectiveness of clientelistic distribution. Where distributive mechanisms are frayed, public employees may face more risks from and be more sensitive to regime repression, but otherwise be just as or more likely as their peers to support credible opposition movements. Examining Sunni participation in Syria’s 2011 protests, I find towns with high levels of public employment protest more frequently than comparable towns with low levels of public employment where there is no nearby military installation able to monitor and punish anti-regime behavior. Additional qualitative research and historical data can further explore the mechanisms underpinning this finding. Current results motivate further attention to how state patronage and sub-national variation in repressive capacity generate compliance.
