Research

PUBLICATIONS

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

Jami Nunez and Elise Pizzi. “Governance and Water Progress for the Rural Poor.” Presented at MPSA 2017.

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.

Pizzi, Elise. "Failure to Favor: Differences Between Water Provision Policy and Implementation in Rural China." Presented at APSA 2016.

Why is ethnic diversity associated with poor public goods provision? I test both the effect of ethnic diversity and the effect of the size of the politically dominant Han ethnic group on public goods provision in China by drawing on a new dataset of more than 10,000 Ministry of Water Resources infrastructure projects in rural Guizhou Province. Despite the lack of electoral incentives to provide for the majority and despite some government policies favoring minority groups, I find that the Chinese government provides drinking water to a higher proportion of the population in areas where the minority population is smaller. Even though policy in China is designed to provide disproportionate benefits to minority areas, the outcome of policy reflects the relative ease of government spending and water provision in largely Han areas. The positive relationship between the dominant Han ethnic group and public goods provision remains significant even in minority autonomous counties.

Burch, Michael and Elise Pizzi. "Strategic Targeting: The Islamic State and Use of Violence in Iraq and Syria." 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.