Dear all, I hope this note finds you well.

We had a great discussion about social media and political violence today.

For next week's reading group, I will present a reading group on anti-war protests. Attached, you will find two papers and a blog post in progress from me.

Recently, we have seen many anti-war protests, even on our campus. However, to the best of my knowledge, there seems to be a lack of empirical or quantitative work studying this phenomenon. In my blog post, I have included some personal thoughts: What are the research questions that are not yet fully explored? How can future research build upon existing knowledge? What exactly is the concept of an anti-war protest? Are there any good data sources you are aware of, or have you read any relevant papers?

With these questions in mind, I hope to gather some insightful thoughts from you. Additionally, we might discuss the differences between writing for an academic journal and a research blog.

Our IR workshop will be held in room 5S.4.19. Here is the Zoom link:

https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/94460872034 if you plan to join us remotely.

Best wishes,

Winnie

Dear Sara, Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and suggestions regarding the literature. I hope everything goes well for you next week.

I've been thinking the same question and think it would be great to be included in the next week's discussion: How are anti-war protests different from other forms of protest?

I think they are distinct, perhaps categorizable as protests against issues occurring overseas. This way of thinking, at least, connects to the literature on whether international community pressure can affect (or not affect) situations in specific regions, and the mechanisms involved. Alternatively, these can be approached as diaspora protests, prompting us to think about the mobilization process, the immigrant community's network and protest entrepreneurs in their new home country. It will be great to hear other people's thoughts on this.

Many thanks in advance for insights from all of you.

Best wishes,

Winnie

Dear Winnie,

Thank you for sharing these interesting papers as well as your draft blog post. Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend the workshop next week due to a medical appointment, but I wanted to share some thoughts on this topic that I hope can be helpful for the discussion. I very much enjoyed today's reading group and think it is a very nice format!

The Vietnan War spurred a great deal of anti-war protests in the US and elsewhere. There is literature on Vietnam war protests and mobilization that can provide important insights into the topic you are interested in. How are anti-war protests different from other types of protests? Do we need to study these separately or can we apply a more general theoretical model to understand this phenomenon? Given the examples you mention in the blog post, what are the political impacts, if any, of anti-war protests (both on the conflict county and in the country where the protests occur)? The topic of political protests straddles disciplines and subfields. Another relevant literature comes from sociology and focuses on social movements (see, e.g. the work of Donatella della Porta)

I hope you all have a productive discussion next week!

Best,

Sara

Since AQ has longer history, could it be due to larger local terrorist groups have affiliated with AQ so left smaller one to affiliate with IS?

Could it be possible control the terrorist groups affiliated with AQ or IS after 2014?

Looks to me it makes more sense to focus on the different effects of affiliation between AQ and IS.

What distinct your research since similar research has been done and three possible outcomes have been argued?

1. Only works for AQ?
2. How about those without affiliation with external networks?
3. How to distinguish whether they affiliate or not? Is it supposed to be secretive?

H1:

1. Majority or minority?

2. Choose policy or elect candidates? Who propose the policy? Is there a candidate from their own ethnicity?

3. The correlation between conservative, traditionalist and authoritarian? Should it be left vs. right?

1. Who are the main victims of the criminal groups? Local or remote? if main victims are remote, local provision of public goods might gain support from local communities, even from local government.
2. Scale of size of the criminal groups: To provide public goods, they have to be big enough; if they are big enough, they need internal governance as well and public goods provision might be a good approach of internal governance. Otherwise, members of the criminal groups might ask for troubles in their spare time.
3. Could be a way to laundry money?
4. The relationship with government authority: competitive, cooperation, or dominant?
5. Who pays the bill? Local residents or profits that criminal groups gained somewhere else?
6. Would it make more sense: Why do some criminal groups provide public goods but others do not?

Very true!

Unfortunately, this is not true. Eunuchs were not more loyal at all. They killed many emperors.

This is an unreasonable assumption either in democracies or in autocracies.

The issue is that is not easy to price. There is no such free market to find the price.

That's not always the case either.

Incumbent advantage.

However, this is not the key point. The issue is that you cannot discuss it without cost. It's not like a bargain in a free market where you just leave without any negative effect if you fail to make a deal with each other.

特供？

This excludes non-democratic countries.

Of course, in some forms of gov- ernment the standard rules or norms for transitions include coup d’état, execution, and the like, so that the theory is not restricted to orderly transitions.

This is confusing: how come disorderly transitions are counted as "within the 'rules'"?

those who have the authority to raise taxes and allocate government funds to pursue chosen policies, including private uses of the monies as well as uses aimed at the general welfare.

This is different in totalitarian countries where there are no such thing as rivals.

In totalitarian countries, the concept of rivals doesn't exist.

Very good example.

Good point and good examples.

I don't think it is central to politics in any type of regime.

That's not true in democratic countries which shift leaders on a fixed and frequent schedule.

If you have to say "choose", it is not the choice of all people, but few in power.

This is not a good example. It was not the people's option. They are forced by power.

So this paper focused on the threat from outsiders.

Where did you get the 33 years?

测试一下。

Le 之还是 yue 之？

good dataset.

Definition of democratic backsliding.

This is a test for CanDoSo.

30 children?

East Asia?

What are other two options?

Authoritarian backsliding.

This is a great mechanism. But, does it work?

Only one speak, just like the case in Russia in 1993.

What about Mitterrand?

But it announced the independence on 16 December 1991. How?

Prempeh, Kwasi H. 2008. ‘Presidential Power in Comparative Perspective: The Puzzling Persistence of Imperial Presidency in Post-Authoritarian Africa.’ Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 35(4): 761–834.

the term limits that take place in authoritarian regimes constitute leadership turnover that takes place within the regime itself, or restrictions to the tenure of the president/leader.

Naive.

Not in Chinese Civil War between 1947-1949.

What to define "constant possibility"?

It could not foster support for regime, but the fear of the regime.

Nonsense. It is normally obvious that who is the troublemaker.

What's point?

This is a special case which the overstayer steps down voluntarily.

80%! That is something.

The author is so naive.

useful data.

This is so clear.

This is great information.

?

1. focal point
2. indicator-tripwire

反送中： Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement

Movement led by women is more likely non-political, so more likely to be peaceful.

Any supportive evidence for this argument?

Weapons of mass destruction

Good questions.

1 in 3

Is it a good index? Doubtful!

stepped down voluntarily or by force

Perpetuated or Perpetrated?

This is great.

Treat it as number?

Which means there is a leading actor, which is ambivalent with the organization level(spontaneous or well planned).

Maybe "main participants"?

How about the time (how long does the event last), size (how many participants)

Could be dintinguished? How much is led by female?

They are intertwined with each other.

Main Argument: * iolence is more extensively used in protest events led by actors with limited mobilization capacity, and weakly connected.

?

The Organization of African Unity (OAU)

Autocoup: Selfcoup

A corruptive government is more critical.

So, should we wait for the complete corruption of CCP?

面部识别技术

寻衅滋事罪

So many?

“境外敌对势力”

韬光养晦

That's right.

Totally agree. It is not that Chinese middle class, or Chinese people is exceptional, but CCP is such an exceptional regime.

Brilliant observation and depiction.

老百姓“原子化”。

Based on a definition of the Asian middle class as those with consumption expenditures of $2 to $20 per person per day in 2005 PPP$, which counts more than 800-million Chinese as middle-class in 2005.

Are you kidding? $2 -$20 per day!

Interesting! Most people are quite satisfied with their status.

Note that this survey is taken in 2008.

Note: 1. Eighty-four percent of autocracies from 1946 to 2010 had a ruling party (Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland 2010), and 57 percent of these parties failed to outlive the founding leader (Meng 2019).

Note: 2. I use the terms “authoritarian regime” and “dictatorship” synonymously. I also use the terms “dictator,” “authoritarian leader,” and “president” interchangeably.

to designate a formal successor

peaceful vs. unpeaceful power transitions:

From 1946 to 2014, only 44 percent of autocratic leadership transitions were peaceful and resulted in the continuation of the regime after the departure of the incumbent.

leadership succession, authoritarian regime, constitutional rules, Africa

$$ Y \sim f_{B}(y ; \theta)= \begin{cases}\theta^{y}(1-\theta)^{1-y} & \forall y \in\{0,1\} \\ 0 & \text { otherwise }\end{cases} $$

$$E[Y]=\theta$$

$$var(Y)=\theta(1-\theta)$$

The key innovation in the likelihood framework is treating the observed data as fixed and asking what combination of probability model and parameter values are the most likely to have generated these specific data.

General Steps

• Step 1: Express the joint probability of the data.
• Step 2: Convert the joint probability into a likelihood.
• Step 3: Use the chosen stochastic and systematic components to specify a probability model and functional form.
• Step 4: Simplify the expression by first taking the log and then eliminating terms that do not depend on unknown parameters.
• Step 5: Find the extrema of this expression either analytically or by writing a program that uses numerical tools to identify maxima and minima.

$$ \mathrm{SSE}=\sum_{i=1}^{n}\left[y_{i}-\left(\beta_{0}+\beta_{1} x_{i}\right)\right]^{2} $$

$$ \begin{aligned} &\hat{\beta}_{0}=\bar{y}-\hat{\beta}_{1} \bar{x} \\ &\hat{\beta}_{1}=\frac{\sum_{i=1}^{n}\left(y_{i}-\bar{y}\right)\left(x_{i}-\bar{x}\right)}{\sum_{i=1}^{n}\left(x_{i}-\bar{x}\right)^{2}} \end{aligned} $$

$$Y_i$$

is distributed iid normal with mean $$μ_i$$ and variance$$σ^2$$

$$ Y \sim f_{\mathcal{N}}(y ; \boldsymbol{\theta})=\frac{1}{\sqrt{2 \pi \sigma^{2}}} \exp \left[-\frac{(y-\mu)^{2}}{2 \sigma^{2}}\right] $$

maximum likelihood:

The MLEs are those that provide the density or mass function with the highest likelihood of generating the observed data.

Let $$T(X)$$ be an estimator for $$\theta$$. The bias of $$T(X)$$, denoted $$\operatorname{bias}(\theta)$$, is $$ \operatorname{bias}(\theta)=\mathrm{E}[T(X)]-\theta $$ The mean squared error, $$\operatorname{MSE}(\theta)$$, is given as $$ \begin{aligned} \operatorname{MSE}(\theta) &=\mathrm{E}\left[(T(X)-\theta)^{2}\right] \ &=\operatorname{var}(T(X))+\operatorname{bias}(\theta)^{2} \end{aligned} $$

$$ \begin{aligned} X & \sim f_{b}(x ; n, p) \\ \operatorname{Pr}(X=k) &=\left\{\begin{array}{lll} \left(\begin{array}{l} n \\ k \end{array}\right) p^{k}(1-p)^{n-k} & \forall & k \in\{0, \ldots, n\} \\ 0 & \forall & k \notin\{0, \ldots, n\} \end{array}\right. \end{aligned} $$

where $$\left(\begin{array}{l}n \ k\end{array}\right)=\frac{n !}{k !(n-k) !}$$ and with $$\mathrm{E}[X]=n p$$ and $$\operatorname{var}(X)=n p(1-p) $$ The Bernoulli distribution is a binomial distribution with $$n=1$$.

Definition of MLE.

$$ f\left(x ; w_{j}, \boldsymbol{\theta}_{j}\right)=\sum_{j=1}^{J} w_{j} g_{j}\left(x ; \boldsymbol{\theta}_{j}\right) $$

$$ \mathcal{L}\left(w_{j}, \boldsymbol{\theta}_{j} \mid \mathbf{x}\right)=\prod_{i=1}^{n}\left[\sum_{j=1}^{J} w_{j} g_{j}\left(x_{i} ; \boldsymbol{\theta}_{j}\right)\right] $$

$$ \begin{aligned} \mathcal{L}_{p}\left(\boldsymbol{\theta}_{1}\right) & \equiv \max _{\boldsymbol{\theta}_{2}} \mathcal{L}\left(\boldsymbol{\theta}_{1}, \boldsymbol{\theta}_{2}\right) \\ & \equiv \mathcal{L}\left(\boldsymbol{\theta}_{1}, \hat{\boldsymbol{\theta}}_{2}\left(\boldsymbol{\theta}_{1}\right)\right) . \end{aligned} $$

Uniform distribution: $$ f(x)= \begin{cases}\frac{1}{b-a} & x \in[a, b] \ 0 & \text { otherwise }\end{cases} $$ $$E[x]={a+b\over2}$$ $$var(X)={(b-a)^2\over12}$$

the Central Limit Theorem tells us the sampling distribution of X̄ is closely approximated to a normal distribution.

1. A sample from population with sample size n.
2. Draw a sample from the original sample data with replacement with size n, and replicate B times, each re-sampled sample is called a Bootstrap Sample, and there will totally B Bootstrap Samples.
3. Evaluate the statistic of θ for each Bootstrap Sample, and there will be totally B estimates of θ.
4. Construct a sampling distribution with these B Bootstrap statistics and use it to make further statistical inference, such as:
   • Estimating the standard error of statistic for θ.
   • Obtaining a Confidence Interval for θ.