Research

PUBLICATIONS

Jami Nunez and Elise Pizzi. 2018. “Governance and Water Progress for the Rural Poor.” Global Governance.

Why do some countries see improvements in access to water for the rural poor while others do not? Even for countries that met the Millennium Development Goals of halving those without water access, the progress accrued largely in urban areas and to the rich. We explore the role that various aspects of governance quality play in extending drinking water access to rural areas, particularly to the very poorest. We draw on a dataset complied from data on governance quality and newly available data on access to water by wealth quintiles to explore change in drinking water access across countries. We find that rural governance quality is far more important for extending water access to the rural poor than it is for the rich. In particular, countries with greater capacity to design and implement policy improve water access rates for the poor more quickly than those with weaker governance, but democracy and voice and accountability do not affect water access for the rural poor or the rich. Our work extends the research on water progress to consider the factors that drive inequities between the rich and the poor and ties into the larger research agenda on the distributive effects of governance in development outcomes.

L. Dilling, E. Pizzi, J. Berggren, A. Ravikumar, K. Andersson. 2017. "Drivers of Adaptation: Responses to weather- and climate-related hazards in 60 local governments in the Intermountain Western U.S." Environment and Planning A.

Cities are key sites of action for adaptation to climate change. However, there are a wide variety of responses to hazards at the municipal level. Why do communities take adaptive action in the face of weather- and climate-related risk? We study what cities are doing in response to existing natural hazards, such as floods, droughts, and blizzards as an analog for understanding the drivers of adaptive behavior toward climate change risks. We conducted a survey of 60 U.S. municipalities and 6 in-depth case studies in the intermountain west states of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah that regularly experience weather and climate extreme events. Our analysis shows that perception of risk and external drivers such as planning requirements or availability of funding stand out as important drivers, although a combination of factors is likely important for taking action. Other important factors include the presence of a policy champion, perceived vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events, and previous experience with a range of types of extreme events. Overall, our results suggest that multiple factors interact or act in combination to produce an enabling environment for action in the face of weather- and climate-related risk.

Pizzi, Elise. 2017. “Does Labor Migration Improve Access to Public Goods in Source Communities? Evidence from Rural China.” Journal of Chinese Political Science. [online]

What is the effect of out-migration on drinking water provision in rural China? Despite concerns about the ability of migrants to contribute to collective action for public goods provision, this study demonstrates that villages with higher rates of labor migration are more likely to have public drinking water than those with little migration. Temporary labor migration reduces isolation and increases the connections outside the village. Funding organizations favor villages where they have contacts as well as villages that they perceive as in need of support because most working-age adults are working outside the village. As a result, villages with high rates of out-migration are more likely have public access to drinking water. The findings are based on data from a survey of more than 50 natural villages in two townships of Southwest China.

Liu, Amy and Elise Pizzi. 2016. “The Language of Economic Growth: A New Measure of Linguistic Heterogeneity.” British Journal of Political Science. [PDF]

Conventional wisdom holds that languages, as ethnic markers, build communities with shared preferences and strong social networks. Consequently, ethnolinguistic homogeneity can facilitate growth. This article challenges this conception of language as a cultural marker. It argues that language is also a practical vehicle of communication; people can be multilingual, and second languages can be learned. Hence language boundaries are neither (1) congruent with ethnic boundaries nor (2) static. If true, the purported advantages of ethnolinguistic homogeneity should also be evident in countries with large populations of non-native speakers conversant in official languages. The study tests this hypothesis using an original cross-national and time-variant measure that captures both mother-tongue speakers and second-language learners. The empirical results are consistent with the understanding of language as an efficiency-enhancing instrument: countries with exogenously high levels of heterogeneity can avoid the ‘growth tragedy’ (Easterly and Levine 1997) by endogenously teaching the official language in schools.

Burch, Michael, and Elise Pizzi. 2014. "Local Fights in National Conflicts: Understanding the Location of Conflict Events during Intrastate Conflict." Civil Wars. 16(1): 24-45. [PDF]

How do rebel groups determine their targets during intrastate conflict? We build upon two competing theories in conflict studies that emphasize either the social or economic determinants of violence during war and use geographic information systems (GIS) analysis to explore these competing theories. To do this, we utilize a subnational analysis of the most likely case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to understand whether ethnicity or natural resources motivates the location of conflict events. Accounting for geography, we find that economic endowments in the form of natural resources are highly related with the number of violent attacks, while the presence of competing ethnic groups does not offer much help in understanding the location of conflict events.

WORKING PAPERS

Pizzi, Elise. "Government priorities and performance in public goods provision: Do pro-minority policies lead to pro-minority implementation?" Under review.

What areas does the Chinese government prioritize for building new drinking water provision infrastructure? Chinese policy favors ethnic minorities and minority autonomous regions due to concerns about inequality and potential instability. However, the implementation of policy does not always reflect the pro-minority government policies. Drawing on a new dataset of more than 10,000 drinking water projects in rural Guizhou Province, I explore how ethnicity and autonomy influence the implementation of public goods provision policy in an authoritarian context. I argue that drinking water facilities are more likely to be built in majority Han areas because implementation and project completion is easier for officials. This study finds that the Chinese government provides drinking water infrastructure at a higher rate to areas where the minority population is smaller. This result indicates that implementation concerns trump policy design when it comes to drinking water infrastructure. The findings have implications for ethnic politics and public goods provision and for the implementation of policy in non-democratic contexts. In addition, these findings demonstrate why regions with larger minority populations are often slower to develop and improve access to basic public services.

Pizzi, Elise and Wenfang Tang. "Political Action by Ethnic Minorities in China." Presented at MPSA 2018.

How does ethnic identity affect political action in nondemocratic countries? While protest is often used to express dissatisfaction and demand government response in China, the risks associated with public demonstrations are higher for minority groups. In addition, government institutions are designed to be more responsive to minority needs. To explore the channels of state engagement for different ethnic groups, we draw on a new dataset of the preferred political activities among 8,000 individuals in China, including more than 1,500 ethnic minorities. Overall, we find that minorities are more likely than Han to prefer resolving issues through government institutions. In addition, Uyghurs and Tibetans are very unlikely to protest or to take no action when faced with a problem. Our results demonstrate that ethnic minorities choose less confrontational and more institutionalized methods for political activity than the Han majority.

Burch, Michael and Elise Pizzi. "Strategic Targeting: The Islamic State and Use of Violence in Iraq and Syria." Under Review. Presented at MPSA 2016.

How do groups like the Islamic State determine where to conduct their campaigns during wartime? We use a micro-foundational approach to examine the patterns of violence of Islamic State campaigns. We argue that while the group uses ideological rhetoric to justify their campaigns, resting upon various ethnic justifications, economic motivations also explain the selection of targets for attack. We test competing theories of the importance of identity and economic rents during wartime using spatial analysis of individual acts of violence by the group from 2011-2014 in both Iraq and Syria relying upon data from the Global Terrorism Database. We find that when considering geographic factors, economic motivations explain the location of battles as well as explanations based on the ethnic makeup of the population. However, both economic and ethnic motivations are more reliable in Iraq than in Syria. By examining the micro-foundations of conflict decisions by the Islamic State, we are able to provide further nuance to understanding the strategic logic of rebel groups during wartime.

Mitchell, Sara and Elise Pizzi. "Environmental Shocks, Migration Patterns, and Civil Conflict: The Importance of Government Policy Responses." Presented at ISA-FLACSO 2018.

A 2014 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) identifies a variety of climate changes that will continue in the next century such as increases in land and ocean surface temperatures, greenhouse emissions, and weather and climate related disasters. These environmental shocks pose many risks to human and state security by reducing food production, increasing water scarcity, creating more environmental migrants and refugees, and raising risks for intrastate and interstate conflicts. While many scholarly studies seek to understand the relationship between natural disasters, climate changes, environmental migration, and political violence, we know less about the conditions that trigger migration in response to environmental shocks. Potential environmental migrants make decisions following disasters based on pre-existing migration patterns, social networks, access to resources, and land ownership, among other factors. Our paper reviews what we know about the linkages between natural disasters, migration, and political violence and discusses how government response conditions the influence of environmental migration on conflict. We identify several limitations with existing approaches including 1) relatively poor data to capture environmental migration, 2) selection effect problems with studying only people who migrate after disasters, 3) failure to capture the endogeneity of disasters and state capacity, and 4) a lack of cross-national data on government policies for relocation or restrictive movement. We argue that we must collect better data on government policies related to relocation programs, restrictions on movement, and post-disaster reconstruction to identify trigger situations where disasters and migration are most likely to produce violence.

Elise Pizzi and Hu Yue. "Are Strict Rules a Deterrent? Political Restrictions and Migration in China." Presented at the Association for Chinese Political Studies 2018.

Why do migrants select some destinations over others? Migration is a pervasive feature of development as labor moves from rural areas to cities in search of work. Labor migration is often temporary and circular, but trends in China point to growth in long term city populations. Still, wages alone do not fully explain migration patterns. Within China, cities vary in the difficulty of getting permanent local resident status and in gaining access to the benefits reserved for those with local status. We argue that these political restrictions play a critical role in migration decision-making, especially in terms of destination choice. We examine our hypotheses with a nationally representative survey and an original survey experiment with a focus on the local resident restrictions. The findings show that the restrictions significantly alter people’s decision about whether or not to migrate and where to migrate. More strict resident regimes deterrent would-be migrants, and current migrants living in strict cities are more likely to say they want to move on. If migrants could gain access to local status in their current location, they are more likely to want to stay. The results are robust even after controlling for the socioeconomic motivation, migration experience, and other alternative factors. Our results demonstrate the complex effects of political restrictions on labor migration and permanent migration patterns.