Scope Conditions Podcast

Today on the podcast, why are more unequal neighborhoods sometimes better at promoting the collective good?
A world of high inequality is, in many ways, a world in which the fortunes of the rich are detached from the welfare of the poor. It’s a world in which the affluent are less reliant on public goods for securing their own safety and wellbeing. Those with money can purchase essential services – even things like security, sewage systems, or street lights – on private markets – rather than turning to the government. A highly unequal society is thus one in which the affluent may have little reason to support public infrastructure and services – or the high taxes required to finance them. It’s a society, in short, that’s going to have a hard time providing widespread public goods. The result can be a vicious circle – deteriorating living conditions among the poorest and growing comfort and prosperity among the better-off.
But our guest today argues that things don’t always have to work this way – that the consequences of inequality depend not only on who has what, but also on where. Dr. Alice Xu is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice and Department of Political Science. In her article published in the American Political Science Review – and a book project currently in progress – Alice argues that whether or not the affluent support the provision of public goods depends on patterns of residential segregation and integration. 
As Alice argues, when the middle and upper classes live in close proximity to the poor, their fortunes are more closely intertwined than they are in cities that are highly segregated by social class. In an integrated city, when the poor experience unsafe streets or disease-ridden sewage runoff, so too do their better-off neighbors. 
Alice talks to us about the in-depth, mixed method study she carried out in several cities in Brazil – one of the world’s most unequal countries. We dig into how class-integrated neighborhoods sometimes escape inequality’s vicious circle – as the middle and upper classes demand that the state invest more generously in urban infrastructure and services for everyone. This is work that doesn’t just shed new light on the political economy of inequality but also holds important lessons for the planning and governance of the world’s cities – in particular, showing just what is at stake in avoiding high levels of segregation by social class.
We hope you enjoy this conversation. To stay informed about future episodes, follow us on Bluesky @scopeconditions and check out our website, scopeconditionspodcast.com, where you can also find references to all the academic works we discuss. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Now, here’s our conversation with Alice Xu.

Works cited in this episode

Allport, Gordon Willard, Kenneth Clark, and Thomas F. Pettigrew. The nature of prejudice. Vol. 2. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1954.
Boustan, Leah Platt. “Was postwar suburbanization ‘white flight’? Evidence from the black migration.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 125, no. 1 (2010): 417–443.
Derenoncourt, Ellora. “Can you move to opportunity? Evidence from the Great Migration.” American Economic Review 112, no. 2 (2022): 369–408.
Habyarimana, James, Macartan Humphreys, Daniel N. Posner, and Jeremy M. Weinstein. Coethnicity: Diversity and the dilemmas of collective action. Russell Sage Foundation, 2009.
McGhee, Heather. The sum of us: What racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together. One World, 2022.
Milanovic, Branko. Worlds apart: Measuring international and global inequality. Princeton University Press, 20

Political analysts are thinking a lot these days about the rule of law: where it comes from, what sustains it, how it can break down. Those are hard enough questions in themselves. And, yet — they simplify away an important complexity. They assume that there is only one law that rules. 
As our guest today, Dr. Egor Lazarev – assistant professor of political science at Yale – points out to us, in many parts of the world, the question is not just whether the law will rule – it’s also which of many legal orders will prevail. In his recent book State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya, Egor studies a setting in which different legal systems have evolved over time and coexist side by side – with matters like marriage, divorce, and murder sometimes being adjudicated by state judges, sometimes by religious courts, and sometimes under customary rules.
Egor first gives us a helpful primer on the Chechnyan civil wars and their central role in the making of Putin’s Russia. We then talk with him about how customary law, Sharia law, and state law operate alongside each other in Chechnya and how those seeking the protection of the law decide which legal order to turn to. As Egor explains, Chechnya is far from unique in displaying what he calls “legal pluralism.” Scholars estimate, for instance, that over 60 countries formally recognize some form of customary or traditional law alongside state law.
For the most part, this is a conversation about two things. First, we might expect that government actors would do all they can to suppress competing legal systems and ensure the primacy of state law. Why, then, do we sometimes see state leaders doing exactly the opposite? Egor tells us about the strategic conditions under which government officials will choose to intentionally strengthen customary or religious law relative to state law – and why a strategy that looks like it would diminish the power of state actors can actually enhance their legitimacy and authority.
This is also a conversation about gender and the law. In his book, Egor argues that the core social divide at the center of legal pluralism is a gender cleavage. Many struggles over social control often revolve around the regulation of female sexuality, around marriage and divorce, property inheritance, and honor and shame – and the different legal orders handle these issues very differently. We talk with Egor about the gendered impacts of state, customary, and Sharia law and about why Chechen women – particularly in the wake of two brutal, socially disruptive civil wars – have been turning to the state judiciary far more than Chechen men.
We hope you enjoy this conversation. To stay informed about future episodes, follow us on Bluesky @scopeconditions and check out our website, scopeconditionspodcast.com, where you can also find references to all the academic works we discuss. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Now, here’s our conversation with Egor Lazarev.

Works cited in this episode
Desmond, M. (2012). Eviction and the reproduction of urban poverty. The American Journal of Sociology, 118(1), 88-133. 
Gibson, E. L. (2013). Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Federal Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Pachirat, T. (2011). Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight. New Haven: Yale University Press. 
Wedeen, L. (2010). Reflections on ethnographic work in political science. Annual Review of Political Science, 13(1), 255-272.

When we think of weak democracies around the world, we often think of their inability to maintain a monopoly on violence because of challenges outside the state – like militias, rebel groups, criminal gangs, and other external, violent organizations. But sometimes it’s actors deeply intertwined with the state – like political parties – who are engaging in the violence. Sometimes, the call is coming from inside the house.
Our guest today, Niloufer Siddiqui, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany - State University of New York, shares with us insights from her award-winning book Under the Gun: Political Parties and Violence in Pakistan. Exploiting subnational variation within the country, Niloufer asks why Pakistani political parties use violence to achieve their goals in some political contexts but not in others. And when they do strategically decide to use violence, when do they take care of things “in house,” having party cadres carry out violent actions and when do they outsource their “dirty work” to other groups, like gangs and militias?
Examining the behavior of several political parties across multiple provinces, Niloufer explains how electoral and economic incentives, the structure of ethnic cleavages, and organizational strength factor into parties’ decisions about whether to use violence – and, if so, whether to outsource it or do it themselves. 
We talk with Niloufer about how she gets at these dynamics by triangulating among survey experiments conducted with voters and elected politicians; about 150 interviews with party officials, journalists, civil society, and police and intelligence officers; and focus groups with party members and voters. Niloufer also tells us how, in doing this work, her own identity as a Muhajir woman gave her special access to one of the major parties she writes about, the MQM party, particularly the female members of the party. 
Lastly, we take a step back and talk with Niloufer about the ethical implications of her study. We ask her whether, in a fragile democracy like Pakistan, there’s some risk in exposing and calling attention to the violent nature of political parties. Might doing so serve to undermine public confidence in the democratic project? Could one unintended consequence of research on democracy’s shortcomings be to give actors like the military a convenient excuse to sweep in and push elected politicians aside? 

Works cited in this episode

Brass, Paul R. The production of Hindu-Muslim violence in contemporary India. University of Washington Press, 2011.
Brubaker, Rogers, and David D. Laitin. “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence.” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 423-452
Graham, Matthew H., and Milan W. Svolik. "Democracy in America? Partisanship, polarization, and the robustness of support for democracy in the United States." American Political Science Review 114, no. 2 (2020): 392-409.
Kalyvas, Stathis N. "The ontology of “political violence”: action and identity in civil wars." Perspectives on politics 1, no. 3 (2003): 475-494.
Milan W. Svolik (2020), "When Polarization Trumps Civic Virtue: Partisan Conflict and the Subversion of Democracy by Incumbents", Quarterly Journal of Political Science: Vol. 15: No. 1, pp 3-31
Wilkinson, Steven. Votes and violence: Electoral competition and ethnic riots in India. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

In democracies all around the world, criminal organizations are involved in electoral politics. Notable examples include the Sicilian mafia and Pablo Escobar's drug cartel in Colombia. We sometimes think of these criminal groups as having politicians in their pockets or as directing politicians to do their bidding at the barrel of a gun.
But our guest today, Jessie Trudeau, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, has spent years studying a different kind of relationship that can evolve between politicians and criminal gangs: candidates for office sometimes hire criminal organizations to be their brokers at election time -- essentially, paying gangs to help them corner the electoral market and mobilize votes. In an award-winning working paper and current book project, Jessie asks why it is that politicians in some parts of the world bring outlaws into their campaigns for office.
We talk with Jessie about the particular qualities of certain criminal organizations that make them especially well suited to scaring up votes, like their control over territory and the relationships they've built with residents. Drawing on extensive interviews she conducted with politicians and gang members in Brazil, Jessie tells us in striking detail about the different forms that these politician-criminal collaborations can take -- from one-off deals to long-term partnerships -- and about the tactics that criminal organizations use -- how they keep competing politicians out and how they induce voters to show up and cast their ballot the "right" way.
Jessie also walks us through the natural experiment that she designed to estimate the electoral bonus that a candidate gets from working with a neighborhood gang. She talks about how she built an unusual over-time dataset tracking criminal group control over each of Rio de Janeiro's 1500 favelas and how she exploited the random assignment of voters to ballot boxes to help her identify the impact of criminal gangs on election outcomes.
Finally, we talk more broadly about the role of criminality in politics and its implications for policy and democratic accountability. What happens when criminal groups get involved in electoral politics not just to earn some extra cash as brokers but to get the kinds of policies they want? Why do criminals sometimes work with politicians as partners but in other places run for office themselves? And what happens to democratic accountability when criminal groups become so good at corralling votes that politicians no longer have to directly appeal to voters' hearts and minds?
 
Works cited in this episode

Barnes, Nicholas. "Criminal politics: An integrated approach to the study of organized crime, politics, and violence." Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 4 (2017): 967-987.
Magaloni, Beatriz, Edgar Franco-Vivanco, and Vanessa Melo. "Killing in the slums: Social order, criminal governance, and police violence in Rio de Janeiro." American Political Science Review 114, no. 2 (2020): 552-572.

Today on Scope Conditions: college dorms shed light on where group culture comes from and how it molds us.
At Harry Potter’s alma mater, each new student is assigned to a House that aligns with their true character. The mystical Sorting Hat takes the courageous ones and sorts them into House Gryffindor, while the studious know-it-alls go to Ravenclaw. The Sorting Hat may be fiction, but it’s actually a lot like life. Much of the social world works this way: whether by assignment or by self-selection, people often end up in social environments that already fit with their pre-existing beliefs and traits.
For social scientists, what’s often called homophily – this tendency for like to attract like – can make it difficult to study the impact of social context itself. Do people tend to believe and act like those around them because they’re influenced by their surroundings, or because they’re drawn to places that already fit their pre-existing characteristics?
Our guest today, Dr. Joan Ricart-Huguet, found a real-world social setting that helps him untangle these possibilities. At East Africa’s oldest institution of higher education, Makerere University in Uganda, incoming students have for decades been allocated to their residence halls by lottery, rather than by personality type. For Joan, Makerere’s randomly assigned dorms have been the perfect laboratory for studying how the cultural characteristics of a social organization arise, endure, and shape people’s beliefs and habits over time. 
Joan is an assistant professor of political science at Loyola University Maryland, and we talk with him about a pair of recent articles he wrote on cultural emergence, persistence, and transmission. Joan tells us about the months of in-depth interviews and immersive fieldwork he conducted on the Makerere campus as well as the natural experiment afforded by random residential assignment that allowed him to test alternative theories of cultural differentiation, reproduction, and impact.
For example, Joan tells us the stories of how distinct hall cultures emerged historically at Makerere – how Livingston Hall came to be known as the residence of respectful gentlemen while Lumumba Hall earned a reputation for rowdy activism. And we learn about the short- and long-term causal effects of these distinct hall cultures on the young adults assigned by chance to live within them.
Works cited in this episode:
Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books.

Guiso, L., P. Sapienza, and L. Zingales. 2006. "Does Culture Affect Economic Outcomes?’" The Journal of Economic Perspectives 20(2): 23-48.

Henrich, J. P. 2017. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton University Press.

Mead, M. 1956. New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation – Manus, 1928-1953. William Morrow and Company.

Paller, J. W. 2020. Democracy in Ghana: Everyday Politics in Urban Africa. Cambridge University Press.

Ricart-Huguet, J. 2022. "Why Do Different Cultures Form and Persist? Learning from the Case of Makerere University." The Journal of Modern African Studies, 60(4): 429-456.

Ricart-Huguet, J. and E. L. Paluck. 2023. "When the Sorting Hat Sorts Randomly: A Natural Experiment on Culture." Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 18(1): 39-73.

Ross, M.H. 2000. “Culture and Identity in Comparative Political Analysis”. In Culture and Politics: A Reader, edited by Lane Crothers and Charles Lockhart. Palgrave Macmillan.

Sewell Jr., W. H. 1999. “The Concept(s) of Culture”. In Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, edited by V. E. Bonnell and L. Hunt. University of California Press.