Tidligere arrangementer - Side 10

With Aurelien Mondon (University of Bath) and Aaron Winter (University of East London)

Title of the presentation "International Sports Events, Media Attention, and Repression: Evidence from the 1978 FIFA World Cup"

Abstract

How do international sports events shape repression in authoritarian host countries? International tournaments promise unique gains in political prestige through global media attention. However, autocrats must fear that foreign journalists will unmask their wrongdoings. We argue that autocracies solve this dilemma by strategically adjusting repression according to the spatial-temporal presence of international media. Using original, highly disaggregated data on the 1978 World Cup, we demonstrate that the Argentine host government largely refrained from repression during the tournament, but preemptively cleansed the streets beforehand. These adjustments specifically occurred around hotels reserved for foreign journalists. Additional tests demonstrate that: 1) before the tournament, repression turned increasingly covert, 2) during the tournament, targeting patterns mirrored the working shifts of foreign journalists, 3) after the tournament, regime violence again spiked in locations where international media had been present. Together, the paper highlights the human costs of mega-events, contradicting the common whitewashing rhetoric of functionaries

Lecturer: Elizaveta Gaufman, University of Groningen

Student Financing for Social Equity in Norway, 1947–2020

Title of the presentation "Ethnic Inequality and Regime Change: Investigating an Asymmetric Relationship"

Abstract

Title: The Institutional Sources of Economic Transformation: Energy Policy from the Oil Crises to Climate Change

Abstract

Why are some governments more effective in promoting economic change than others? We develop a theory of the institutional sources of economic transformation. Domestic institutions condition the ability of policymakers to impose costs on consumers and producers. We argue that institutions can enable transformation through two central mechanisms: insulation and compensation. The institutional sources of transformation vary across policy types—whether policies impose costs primarily on consumers (demand-side policies) or on producers (supply-side policies). Proportional electoral rules and strong welfare states facilitate demand-side policies, whereas autonomous bureaucracies and corporatist interest intermediation facilitate supply-side policies. We test our theory by leveraging the 1973 oil crisis, an exogenous shock that compelled policymakers to simultaneously pursue transformational change across OECD countries. Panel analysis, case studies, and discourse network analysis support our hypotheses. The findings offer important lessons for contemporary climate change policy and low-carbon transitions.

Politics and administrative turnover in highly meritocratic systems

With Stephen D. Ashe (Durham University), John P. Jackson (Michigan State University) and Rae Jereza (New Jersey Institute of Technology)

Martin Søyland (Political Science, UiO) presents his R package stortingscrape. This R package aims to effectivize this process for Norwegian parliamentary data. The package makes the data easily accessible, while also being flexible enough for tailoring the different underlying data sources to ones needs. The package philosophy revolves around three core consepts: 1) simplify data formats as much as possible, 2) make interconnected sources of data easily mergable, and 3) minimize overlap in information for different retrival functions.

Lecturer: Richard Javad Heydarian

With Maura Conway (Dublin City University)

Title of the presentation "Land Property Rights, Cadasters and Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Panel 1000-2015 CE”

Abstract

Since the transition to agricultural production, property rights to land have been a key institution for economic development. Clearly defined land rights provide economic agents with increased access to credit, secure returns on investment, free up resources used to defend one's land rights, and facilitate land market transactions. Formalized land records also strengthen governments' capacity to tax land-owners. Despite a large body of extant micro-level empirical studies, macro-level research on the evolution of formal rights to land, and their importance for economic growth, has so far been lacking. In this paper, we present a novel data set on the emergence of state-administered cadasters (i.e. centralized land records) for 159 countries over the last millennium. We also analyze empirically the association between the development of cadastral institutions and long-run economic growth in a panel of countries. Our findings demonstrate a substantive positive effect of the introduction of cadasters on modern per capita income levels, supporting theoretical conjectures that states with more formalized property rights to land should experience higher levels of economic growth.

Title of the presentation "Regime Threats and State Solutions”

The Research Infrastructure Services Department at USIT is responsible for national e-infrastructure services for computation, storage of research data and more. The group is also responsible for UiO's involvement in national, Nordic and European initiatives and other cooperation projects and initiatives in the field of e-infrastructure and scientific computing.

Lecturer: Cristina Moreno Almeida, King's College London

Ten years since the 22 July 2011 attacks in Norway, the right-wing extremism landscape has significantly shifted. This Live Briefing, hosted by ICCT in collaboration with the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo and the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University in Washington D.C., will feature a roundtable discussion by leading academic and policy experts on right-wing extremism. 

C-REX and CEP have organized an online public event to commemorate the Oslo/Utøya and 9/11 attacks, analyze their long-term impact, and assess the current terrorist landscape emanating from the extreme right-wing terrorist milieu as well as the Islamist terrorist scene. The recordings of the webinar are available below.

Lecturer: Ihsan Yilmaz, Deakin University

Lecturer: Eviane Leidig, International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague (ICCT) 

The Summer School on Concepts and Methods for Research on Far-Right Politics will take place virtually from 28 June to 2 July 2021.

Why is it so difficult to do conclusive research on extremism? How is studying far-right extremism different from Islamist and other types of extremism? What are the ethical dilemmas when working with young people in milieus that are frequently targeted by stereotypes and racism? And what are the dangers researchers face when conducting fieldwork?

Optical character recognition (OCR) promises to open vast bodies of historical data to scientific inquiry, but OCR can be cumbersome when documents are noisy. The past 18 months have seen the launch of new OCR processors with vastly improved accuracy. In this seminar, Thomas Hegghammer will give an overview of the latest tools and present a new R package that offers access to the most powerful of them all, Google Document AI.