Do Enfranchised Immigrants Affect Political Behaviour?

Abstract : This paper analyses 3 million UK Parliament speeches between 1972 and 2011 to understand how the migration flow of immigrants affect the incumbent’s behaviour towards existing and prospective immigrants. As a legacy of the British Empire, the immigrants from commonwealth countries in the UK have a right to vote in the national elections, while the non-commonwealth immigrants do not have this enfranchisement power. I find an increase in the share of enfranchised immigrants makes the incumbent spend more time in the Parliament talking about existing immigrants, address existing immigrants with positive emotion and vote to make future immigration tougher. An increase in disenfranchised immigrants leads to the opposite effect. The enfranchised immigrants undertake more socio-political actions (signing a petition, participating in protests, contacting a politician etc.) compared to disenfranchised immigrants, which drives the incumbent’s behaviour. Disenfranchised immigrants only catch up with the enfranchised immigrants after naturalisation.

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Walking Together and Alone: How Peaceful Protests Fail and Can Yet Succeed in Remaking Our World

Abstract : We walk in the footsteps of the pioneers of the nonviolent approach to provide a reinterpretation of the histories of the great movements of the twentieth century from a game theoretic perspective, bringing to bear a host of new quantitative analyses to understand the challenges they faced, when they were successful at overcoming them and why. We develop a simple conceptual framework for understanding the strategies available to both the leaders and the followers of political movements, the media and outside audiences, as well as the regimes that they seek to influence, and how these decisions interact. We use this framework to highlight the presence of three key tensions that exist in many political movements. These tensions include: those between the allure of violence and the seeming pedestrianism of nonviolence, between the need for numbers and the need for focus, and between organizations that depend on grassroots mobilization versus hierarchies and leadership. In light of the framework and new quantitative evidence, we then retrace and re-examine the decisions of the participants of the Indian Independence Movement in each of their three great nonviolent drives for change—the Non-Cooperation Movement of the 1920s, the Civil Disobedience Movement of the 1930s and the Quit India Movement of the 1940s—and how they succeeded or failed in addressing these tensions. At each step, we also discuss both grand strategy and the effectiveness of local tactics. We next compare the Indian experience with the movements that came after, including the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, the Arab Spring and recent protests around the world. Finally, we draw on what we have learned to suggest ideas for better implement nonviolent protests today.

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Does It Pay off to Demonstrate Against the Far Right?

Abstract : We study whether demonstrating against a party can affect election results. To do so, we use the demonstrations that were held on May 1, 2002 in France, between the two rounds of a presidential election where far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen competed against right of center incumbent Jacques Chirac. Around 350 demonstrations took place across France on the same day to call for a mobilization against the far right. Using variation in rainfall as an exogenous source of variation in rally attendance, we find that a larger number of partici-pants reduced the number of votes of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the number of invalid ballots, and increased the number of votes for Jacques Chirac. We further observe that the effects of demonstrations were not limited to the municipalities in which they took place but also af-fected the outcomes of other municipalities. Regarding possible mechanisms, we provide suggestive evidence that demonstrations signaled that voting for the far right was socially unacceptable and changed voters’ perceptions of Le Pen’s policies.

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