How does the public react to political assassinations? This study investigates the impact of political assassinations on public trust in institutions using the case of Chokri Belaid's assassination in Tunisia as a quasi-experiment. Analyzing an original dataset of news articles published in national media outlets, I find that the assassination had a causal effect on media associations of the main ruling party with violence and assassination but no effect on the association with policy or security failure. Using an "Unexpected Event During Survey" design, I further examine the effect of the assassination on public trust in institutions. The results show that the assassination positively affected public trust in the cabinet, parliament, and police, while trust in the military remained unchanged. These findings support the "rally-around-the-flag" hypothesis and contradict elite cueing and accountability theories. Building on observations of media content diffused following the attack, I present a theoretical model that explains the psychological effect of elite cues on public attitudes toward institutions. To test external validity, I examine two most-different cases : the assassinations of JFK and MLK in the 1960s United States. I find that civilian actors benefited from a rally effect. However, the affect towards the police was negatively impacted, suggesting that the direction of the effect of political assassinations on public opinion depends on the contextual perception of the police.

What is the causal relationship between schooling and political cleavage formation in postcolonial contexts? This paper explores the selective provision of secondary schooling after colonialism in Tunisia as a mechanism driving spatial variation in political identification along the Islamist-Secularist cleavage. The paper develops a novel theory linking the spatiotemporal spread of distinct factions within Tunisia’s independence struggle and tests the hypothesis that after colonialism, Habib Bourguiba’s (1956-1987) regime employed education selectively in order to reward loyalists and to punish opponents. In order to test this claim, the study conducts analysis employing originally collected event data from French, American and Tunisian archives and a novel dataset of schools constructed after colonialism in Tunisia. The study rigorously describes the spatiotemporal pattern of contention in late colonial Tunisia, tracing the activities of factions loyal to Bourguiba and to his primary opponent Salah Ben Youssef prior to independence. Second, this paper traces postcolonial development, linking the schism between Bourguiba and Ben Youssef to development after colonialism. Third the paper employs a matching strategy to assess the causal relationship between levels and kinds of contentious politics in the late colonial period and subsequent political development.

This article examines the long-term consequences of President Habib Bourguiba’s secular legacy on democratic attitudes, specifically, on attitudes toward gender equality and toward the separation of state and religion. In 1956, following the independence of Tunisia, Bourguiba adopted a series of progressive and secular policies that aimed to limit Islamic religious laws and introduce secular civic institutions. I hypothesize that people socialized under Bourguiba’s rule are more supportive of secular policies than those who lived under other regimes. Using the Arab Barometer data, I test this hypothesis by examining how Bourguiba’s secular policies might have affected attitudes toward the separation between state and religion as well as gender norms. The findings show that people with adult and early exposure to Bourguiba’s regime are more likely to support laws based on the will of the people (in contrast to laws based on Sharia) and more likely to support equal inheritance between men and women than as opposed to people with little to no exposure. These findings contribute to recent work on historical legacies and political attitudes.

The Arab Uprisings had a profound impact on the domestic politics of affected states as well as regional politics. Most studies choose to focus on how these major protest movements impacted regime durability and democratization prospects, or how they transformed into civil conflict that created or protracted existing refugee crises. This paper aims to explore how these critical events affected policies governing the flow of peoples; how did the uprisings affect migration laws? How did they impact nationality and citizenship laws? In this paper, I argue that uprising outcomes are associated with migration, nationality, and citizenship policy changes, and specifically as they pertain to emigrant and extraterritorial citizen rights and responsibilities as codified in law. States where uprisings toppled incumbents or brought an overhaul of the regime also saw significant changes to their migration, nationality, and citizenship policies with broad impact. In states where regimes survived major protest, migration and nationality laws as well as legal amendments and decrees were tactfully instrumentalized to bolster regime support without changing the nature of the state-emigrant relationship. The paper employs a comparative case analysis of four states, where incumbents either lost power or survived, that experienced a sustained upheaval in the early wave of the Arab uprisings – namely Bahrain, Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia. The paper seeks to unpack how mass protests produce institutional effects transcending the spatial boundaries of the state.