Research

Publications

Conspiracy and antisemitism in contemporary political attitudes
Political Research Quarterly
Jacob S. Lewis

The rise of populist politics around the world has been accompanied by a startling growth of mainstream conspiracy theorizing and antisemitism. Yet, while conspiracy, antisemitism, and populist politics seem to be related, we have little information about the causal relationships between them. Plausible explanations can link any of these three factors to one another in any configuration of causal relationships. In this exploratory research, I employ a series of experimental methods to begin teasing out these relationships while sketching the contours of the broader societal story. Drawing from multiple pre-registered survey experiments conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom, I find strong mutually reinforcing relationships between antisemitism and conspiracy theorizing. Among supporters of Joe Biden in 2020, I find evidence that exposure to conspiracies increases perceptions of Jewish political and economic power. And among supporters of Donald Trump in 2020, I find that exposure to benign vignettes about Jews increases conspiratorial thinking.

What determines the duration of protest events in Africa?
Government & Opposition
Jacob S. Lewis & William Favell

What determines why some protest events last only a single day while others can stretch over multiple days? This study presents the first cross-national quantitative analysis of the factors that shape protest event duration. This study argues that protest event duration is the function of factors that increase momentum (e.g. protest size, location and participants) while also examining whether repression attenuates such momentum. Using the Armed Conflict Location Event Data, this study employs two multilevel statistical methods to examine the factors that matter. First, the study examines the day-by-day factors that shape whether a protest will continue the next day. Second, the study examines the overall duration of events. The analyses find strong support that protests in capitals and urban areas, as well as protests featuring students, labour unions and professional organizations, last longer, while repression does truncate events.

Violent Riots and South African Satisfaction with Democracy
Political Behavior
Jacob S. Lewis

The past decade has witnessed growing challenges to democracies around the world, with rising levels of democratic discontent and political violence. While a growing body of work has begun examining the determinants of satisfaction with democracy in European and American contexts, less is known about the African context. South Africa serves as a particularly fruitful case to study, as it shares many western-style institutions and elections, but has come to be known as a “violent democracy,” where citizens regularly engage in political violence to extract concessions and enforce government accountability. This study examines how exposure to protests and riots affects citizen satisfaction with democracy. Using geolocated data from four successive rounds of the Afrobarometer data as well as data from the Armed Conflict Location Event Data. I find that exposure to local violent riots correlates with reduced reports of satisfaction with democracy. I find that these results are robust, even when integrating measures of control against endogeneity into the models.

Antisemitic Hate Crime Exposure and Foreign Policy Preferences
Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism
Ayal K. Feinberg & Jacob S. Lewis

While hate crime continues to be a grossly understudied phenomenon in political science, research focusing on hate crime is growing because of several recent high-profile incidents. Scholars have been seeking to better understand the effects that hate crimes have on target-ed communities. We build from and expand on this literature by examining how exposure to hate crime alters social and political attitudes, specifically foreign policy preferences, at a national level. Using a novel survey experiment and a self-selecting sample taken from a recruited panel—although demographic quotas were imposed, there were certain respects in which the panel was not representative of the US population, in particular regarding under-representation of self-identified conservatives—we identify that antisemitic hate crime exposure substantially alters foreign policy positions. Specifically, exposure to antisemitic hate crime both with and without explicit anti-Zionist motivations significantly increases sympathy and support for Israel, even when controlling for prior beliefs about Israel and Jews. Furthermore, we find that this hate crime-induced sympathy has measurable impacts on particular bilateral policy positions, including increased support for U.S. preferential trade and military aid with Israel. Our survey experiment also shows that the effects of antisemitic hate crime exposure on national foreign policy positions are mediated by various factors, including partisanship, religious identification, and age, among others

Repression, backlash, and the duration of protests in Africa
Journal of Peace Research, 2023
Jacob S. Lewis & Brandon J. Ives

This article investigates the relationship between recent repression of protest and the duration of future protests. A rich scholarship examines how repression impacts dissent, highlighting dissent dimensions such as the number of future events and violent escalation. Less examined is another dimension of dissent—protest duration. We hypothesize that recent repression of protests is pivotal for longer duration of future protest events. Our expectation stems from a participant type mechanism. Recent repression of protest may generate more societal grievances but also increase protesting risks. A simultaneous jump in grievances and risks may increase the number of people protesting who are also risk-acceptant and willing to protest for longer durations. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project data and hierarchal negative binomial models are used to estimate the association between recent repression of protest and subsequent protest duration. Compared to having none of the most recent three protests repressed, a protest in a location where the last three protests were repressed has a substantively longer duration. The results are consistent with the participant type mechanism and existing literature on repression’s heterogeneous effects on individuals.

What drives support for separatism? Exposure to conflict and relative ethnic size in Biafra, Nigeria
Nations and Nationalism, 2023
Jacob S. Lewis

What determines support for separatist movements in Africa? The past two decades have seen a rise in separatism across Africa, including renewed Nigeria’s Igbo Biafran nationalism. While a large body of work has focused on the behaviour of African separatist movements themselves, less work has examined the correlates of popular support for their claims and goals. This study does so, focusing on two important factors. First, it examines whether exposure to conflict events involving neo-Biafran movements increases or decreases support for the claims made by the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB). The study uses geocoded data from the Afro-barometer and ACLED datasets to measure proximate expo-sure and finds that more exposure correlates positively with support for secession. Second, it argues that the highest levels of support should be associated with members of ethnic groups that would dominate the proposed state. Drawing again from Afrobarometer, the study finds support for this.

Proximate Exposure to Conflict and the Spatiotemporal Correlates of Social Trust
Political Psychology, 44(3): 667-687. 2022
Jacob S. Lewis & Sedef A. Topal

How does exposure to conflict events shape social trust? Research in political psychology predicts that conflict exacerbates group divisions, enhancing ingroup solidarities while simultaneously reducing outgroup trust. Experimental research has found support for these predictions, and yet measuring the impact of conflict on trust beyond the laboratory is difficult. For example, questions about the lasting salience of experimental treatments remain a challenge in the study of conflict. We develop an empirical strategy using geocoded individual-level survey data from the Afrobarometer project and geocoded conflict-event data. We draw spatial and temporal buffers around each survey respondent that allow us to test whether proximate exposure to conflict events correlates with lower social trust, as well as how far and long that salience lasts. We find that exposure to conflict reduces generalized and outgroup trust, as predicted. Contrary to our expectations, we find that it reduces ingroup trust. We investigate further and find that ingroup trust suffers most when respondents live in homogenous ethnic enclaves. Furthermore, we advance an argument that the effects of exposure to conflict are mitigated over distance and time. Our results indicate that the effect diminishes over both time and space.

Repression and bystander mobilization in Africa
Social Movement Studies, 22(4): 494-512. 2022
Jacob S. Lewis

How does exposure to government repression shape bystander willingness to mobilize into a protest or demonstration? A robust body of scholarship has argued that repression can backfire, motivating activists to take to the streets after the government clamps down. Yet, while the evidence is strong that highly motivated and risk-acceptant citizens are willing to step up, less is known about how repression affects the majority of citizens who do not frequently participate in protests. Yet, theories of civil resistance often depend on mobilizing bystanders. I examine this by drawing on geocoded survey data as well as incident-level data of repression across Africa. I measure each respondent’s exposure to government repression across multiple spatial and temporal buffers. Contrary to expectations in the civil resistance literature, I find that exposure to repression correlates with a lower willingness to consider joining a protest or demonstration. The closer a respondent is, both temporally and spatially, to an incident of repression, the less likely they are to report that they would consider joining a protest. The results are robust to additional testing specifications that address issues of endogeneity, social desirability bias, and omitted variable bias.

Territorial origins of center-seeking and self-determination claims in Africa
Political Geography. Volume 94. 2022
Jacob S. Lewis & Mike Widmeier

Why doesn’t Africa have more self-determination movements? Given the prevalence of weak states, artificial borders, and high ethnic diversity, one might expect that the majority of African rebel groups would pursue self-determination outcomes. Yet, the data indicate that most rebel groups have attempted to capture the state in center-seeking conflicts rather than to break off a piece of it. Why? In this study, we argue that the exogenously determined territorial size of the country in which new groups emerge shapes whether groups pursue center-seeking or self-determination outcomes. We argue that the size of the territory determines the overall cohesion of the state, which then shapes the political imagination of the group, affecting how an emerging rebel group conceives of itself and its constituents relative to the state. We also argue that the size of the territory shapes the perceived feasibility of either center-seeking or self-determination outcomes. Drawing from a recent dataset on rebel group emergence, we find support that rebel groups emerging in large states are more likely to seek self-determination than rebel groups in small states. We test multiple alternative arguments and find that our results are robust to them as well as additional testing specifications.

Signals, strongholds, and support: political party protests in South Africa
Politics, 41(2): 189-206. 2021
Jacob S. Lewis

South African politics are in a period of transition: the dominant African National Congress (ANC) is in decline, support for opposition parties has been rising, and voters have been disengaging rapidly from the electoral process. As protest movements have become more common and more powerful, established political parties have increasingly led their own protests, often addressing the same issues that citizens rise up about. This phenomenon has been understudied but has important ramifications for the future of South African politics. This article addresses this gap in the literature, arguing that party-led protests can be interpreted as costly signals of credible commitments to address the very issues that citizens are upset about. In a time when established parties are losing support, they may turn to these costly protests to demonstrate their commitment to addressing the needs of the people. Using counts of party-led protests and riots as well as election outcomes in the 2004, 2009, 2014, and 2019 national elections, this article demonstrates that party-led protests primarily target stronghold municipalities. In doing so, they positively correlate with vote-shares during elections. This boon accrues primarily to the opposition parties, but not the incumbent ANC.

Corruption Perceptions and Contentious Politics
Political Studies Review, 19(2): 227-244. 2021
Jacob S. Lewis

Does corruption increase general and anti-government protest? Scholarship has produced seemingly incompatible results, with some research demonstrating a strong connection between corruption and the onset of contentious politics and other research finding that heightened perceptions of corruption decrease activism. This article addresses this puzzle by examining how different types of corruption condition diverging contentious outcomes. Focusing on two highly salient forms of corruption in the African context—elite corruption and police corruption—this article argues that the different consequences, salience, and costs associated with these two forms help to condition whether citizens rise up or stay home. This argument is tested via two methods. First, it draws from a survey experiment conducted in five Nigerian states in 2017. The survey experiment tests whether exposure to different types of corruption affects willingness to join in protests. Second, it draws from statistical analysis of geo-located perceptions of corruption and protest across Africa, incorporating checks for both collinearity and endogeneity into the model. The statistical analysis examines whether heightened perceptions of corruption correlate with increased counts of general and anti-government protest. The results from both methods demonstrate that elite corruption is positively correlated with protest, whereas police corruption is not.

From Rallies to Riots: Why Some Protests Become Violent
Journal of Conflict Resolution, 64(5): 958-986. 2020
Brandon J. Ives & Jacob S. Lewis

When do nonviolent protests escalate into violence? Existing literature has focused primarily on campaign-level escalations and only recently has work begun to examine protest event-level escalations. We build on this emerging literature and develop an argument for why some protests escalate to violence. We use statistical analysis and find that violent escalations are more likely to occur following recent repression and when protests are unorganized. Our results offer insight into the conditions in which protests remain peaceful and offer citizens a channel to pursue their goals as well as the conditions in which protests become violent and destabilizing.

Monographs & Whitepapers

  1. “The role of trust in mobilization and nonviolent discipline: Civil resistance evidence from Africa” Peer-reviewed monograph. International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. 2021.
  2. “How does exposure to conflict events shape social trust? A spatiotemporal approach.” With Sedef Topal. Afrobarometer Working Paper 189.