The following is a list of my published and ongoing projects. Please email me at sarah_hummel@fas.harvard.edu for the latest version of any working papers.

Publications:

• Leader Age, Death, and Political Liberalization in Dictatorships

This article examines how expectations about the likelihood of a dictator's death affect the strategic calculations of regime insiders and potential challengers. On the one hand, would-be reformers are better positioned to plan and execute post-death challenges as dictators age. On the other hand, regime insiders anticipate these challenges and try to proactively solve the problem of political succession. The circumstances surrounding leader death determines which of these competing effects dominates. Accordingly, leader death is more liberalizing as leaders age in personalist regimes compared to non-personalist regimes, and in countries with high levels of economic development compared to those with low levels of development. Furthermore, preemptive actions in personalist dictatorships, such as coup attempts and irregular removals, are more likely as leaders age and their death becomes imminent.

Forthcoming at the Journal of Politics

• Sideways Concessions and Individual Decisions to Protest

Sideways concessions to protest are policy reforms that decrease grievance among potential protesters, without being directly linked to the stated demands of the protest. By avoiding both the backlash effect of repression and the inspirational effect of direct concessions, they are theoretically powerful tools for quelling unrest. This article evaluates the effectiveness of sideways concessions at reducing individual mobilization potential using a survey experiment conducted in Kyrgyzstan in October 2015. The evidence shows sideways concessions are effective among respondents who were dissatisfied with the government and not optimistic about the future of the country. The article also demonstrates the plausibility of these results in other settings, drawing on observational data from the 2014 Gezi Park protests in Turkey and the 2013 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine.

Forthcoming at Comparative Politics

• Relative Water Scarcity and Country Relations along Cross-Boundary Rivers: Evidence from the Aral Sea Basin

How do countries that share cross-border rivers respond to periods of abnormally low water availability? Existing research concerning water scarcity focuses on how cross-basin differences in absolute availability influence relations between countries. I argue that understanding whether countries react cooperatively or conflictually to within-basin shortages is important. I use the case of two major cross-boundary rivers in the Aral Sea basin of Central Asia to study the effects of within-basin relative scarcity. Employing original data on interactions among the Central Asian countries over the issue of water management, I find an association between, on the one hand, relative water scarcity and, on the other hand, an increased likelihood of both cooperative and conflictual interactions. By showing that relative scarcity affects when cooperative and conflictual events occur, my analysis highlights the fact that absolute scarcity is not the only type of water scarcity that influences international relations on cross-boundary rivers.

International Studies Quarterly, 61(4):795-808

Ongoing Projects:

• Understanding Legislative Behavior in Non-Democracies

A growing body of evidence suggests that many - if not most - legislatures in non-democratic countries are more than just window-dressing. Such legislatures may serve as a way to monitor the leader by reassuring political elites who fear being sidelined or at potential investors who fear expropriation, as forums for co-opting elites through policy concessions or direct material benefits of office-holding, or as means of gathering information about the broader citizenry through a form of quasi-representation. However, micro-level evidence about legislative behavior in non-democracies has not kept pace with macro-level theories of the existence and functions of legislatures. In this project, I evaluate how predictions derived from these broader theories of monitoring, co-optation, and quasi-representation map onto the actual the behavior of legislators. In doing so, I examine roll-call votes, the initiation of legislation, and patterns of amendment for three cases: the Russian State Duma, the Kyrgyz Jogorku Kenesh, and the Georgian Parliament.

Kyrgyzstan Working Paper (updated 11/16/2018)

• Sideways Concessions: Protest and Cooperative Resource Management in Central Asia

Granting concessions directly to an ongoing protest does not always have the desired effect. By signaling the government's weakness, direct concessions can reinvigorate, rather than demobilize, the protest movement. To decrease the risk of this occurring, governments may choose concessions that are "sideways" to the central concerns of protesters. Sideways concessions reduce the level of grievance among citizens, even as their indirect nature minimizes the likelihood of any escalatory effects. This article illustrates the use of sideways concessions in post-Soviet Central Asia during the 2000s, demonstrating that governments signed short-term international agreements over resource management as a sideways concession to protests occurring in regions that benefited from a cooperative management regime. This finding suggests that governments do, indeed, use sideways concessions and that we should account for their use when considering the dynamics of protest escalation and deescalation.

Working Paper (updated 11/16/2018)

• Buying the People or the Purse-Strings? The Allocation of Housing Projects in Turkey

How do political parties distribute economic benefits to maximize the expected electoral return on their investment? In this paper, I focus on whether parties accomplish this by appealing directly to citizens or, instead, focus on gaining the support of key financial actors in important electoral districts. To answer this question, I utilize data from the centrally-administered TOKI project on the allocation of housing projects in modern Turkey. I examine whether electoral considerations better explain the geographic location of the housing projects themselves or the geographic location of the construction firms hired to fulfill these contracts.

• Protester Identity and Government Response to Initial Protest

Does the identity of protesting groups influence whether governments respond with repression or not? This paper uses a formal model to examine how different features of protesting groups combine with country-level characteristics to determine government response. I argue that features of the initial group of protestors play an important role in determining the equilibrium level of repression. Specifically, bad governments are more likely to repress protests by stronger groups, which might pose a threat to the regime even in the absence of escalation, and those that are better informed, which send a stronger signal about the government's type. I use global event data to provide preliminary evidence in support of these hypotheses.

• The Effect of Leadership Selection Mechanisms on Inter-group Games (co-authored with Stephen Chaudoin and Yon Soo Park)

Major decisions about inter-group interactions are made by leaders, and groups vary significantly in how those leaders come to power. This paper assesses how leader selection mechanisms affect inter-group contests, which are a natural analogue to conflictual interactions like war or lobbying for a preferred policy. In this laboratory experiment, we set up inter-group contest games using an online pool of participants, vary characteristics of leader selection mechanisms, and observe changes in how leaders behave. While existing laboratory experiments almost universally find positive effects of democratic elections in within-group games, we expect that democratically selected representatives will exert excessive effort in inter-group contests to the detriment of group performance outcomes and global welfare.

• Political Selection Procedures, Executive Constraints, and Idiosyncratic Leadership Effects

Like the citizens they represent, political leaders have varying preferences and capabilities. As a result, different leaders may react differently, even when facing very similar situations. In this paper, I argue that both political selection procedures and institutional constraints moderate these idiosyncratic leadership effects. Regular political selection procedures increase the expected similarity between a new leader and his or her predecessor, while institutional constraints on the executive hinder the expression of any such differences. Therefore, I expect idiosyncratic leader effects are most likely when political selection is irregular and institutional constraints are low. I evaluate these expectations by examining a variety of outcome variables identified in the existing literature as being affected by the idiosyncrasies of leaders.