Kristen Kao
After having received my PhD in Political Science at UCLA, I moved to Sweden to be a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Program on Governance and Local Development at the University of Gothenburg. We run the Local Governance Performance Index (LGPI), a survey based tool designed to be representative at the local level and measure various aspects of governance, socio-economic inequalities, and service provision, in countries around the world.
My dissertation research employs a mixed method approach and a novel dataset to explore how autocrats utilize elections to maintain ethnically splintered political support through redistribution. I analyze the full parliamentary election results from 1989-2013, leveraging historical shifts between three different types of electoral institutions to examine their effect on the formation of successful voter coalitions. Constituent service casework logs of parliamentarians containing thousands of requests they make on behalf of their constituents to the regime and over 100 interviews collected during fieldwork in Jordan provide evidence that multimember districts are engender tribal voting and ethnic favoritism in parliamentary provision of state goods and services in contrast to single member districts where parliamentarians cobbled together more ethnically diverse support coalitions and tribalism does not explain their service provision patterns.
A nationwide survey in Jordan (N=1,500) I ran in April of 2014 in collaboration with the Governance and Local Development (GLD) Program at Yale University and Professor Ellen Lust (University of Gothenburg) and Lindsay Benstead (Portland State University) bolsters these findings demonstrating that among participants registered in multimember districts, those who have had a tribal Member of Parliament in the past are more likely to participate in elections than those who have not, whereas a tribal connection does not determine turnout in single-member districts. This research highlights the importance of political analysis at the sub-national level and debunks the myth that political organization around primordial identities in elections is inevitable in the developing world. My data demonstrates that electoral institutions play a meaningful role in shaping entrenched inequalities in access to government services and life opportunities for the citizens living under the rule of dictators.
Supervisors: Ellen Lust and Barbara Geddes - Chair of Dissertation Committee
My dissertation research employs a mixed method approach and a novel dataset to explore how autocrats utilize elections to maintain ethnically splintered political support through redistribution. I analyze the full parliamentary election results from 1989-2013, leveraging historical shifts between three different types of electoral institutions to examine their effect on the formation of successful voter coalitions. Constituent service casework logs of parliamentarians containing thousands of requests they make on behalf of their constituents to the regime and over 100 interviews collected during fieldwork in Jordan provide evidence that multimember districts are engender tribal voting and ethnic favoritism in parliamentary provision of state goods and services in contrast to single member districts where parliamentarians cobbled together more ethnically diverse support coalitions and tribalism does not explain their service provision patterns.
A nationwide survey in Jordan (N=1,500) I ran in April of 2014 in collaboration with the Governance and Local Development (GLD) Program at Yale University and Professor Ellen Lust (University of Gothenburg) and Lindsay Benstead (Portland State University) bolsters these findings demonstrating that among participants registered in multimember districts, those who have had a tribal Member of Parliament in the past are more likely to participate in elections than those who have not, whereas a tribal connection does not determine turnout in single-member districts. This research highlights the importance of political analysis at the sub-national level and debunks the myth that political organization around primordial identities in elections is inevitable in the developing world. My data demonstrates that electoral institutions play a meaningful role in shaping entrenched inequalities in access to government services and life opportunities for the citizens living under the rule of dictators.
Supervisors: Ellen Lust and Barbara Geddes - Chair of Dissertation Committee
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