Political Science

Raising a family is di cult enough. Raising a Ph.D. can be just as involved. This dissertation would not have been possible without the incredible support from my advisors, parents, mentors, friends, colleagues and a number of academic organizations. I am deeply indebted to my committee who have guided me over the course of many conversations, classes and zip codes. I must start by thanking James Morrow, professor of World Politics at the University of Michigan. Through all of this, from my rst course on international relations in undergraduate school to the completion of my dissertation, he taught and mentored me. He showed me how to be bold in intellectual pursuits and that the best work came from asking the hardest questions.

This paper presents new evidence that, historically, the relationship between political regime type and warfare was different than it is today. Using a novel database of interstate conflict in Europe between 1200 and 1800, we perform the first quantitative analysis of domestic political institutions and warfare across the pre-modern era. We find that early parliamentary regimes-the institutional predecessors of modern democracies-were disproportionately more likely to experience armed conflict than their absolutist counterparts. Our empirical strategy makes use of two complementary approaches: a standard dyadic analysis of conflict initiation, and a dynamic network analysis that accounts for interdependence between dyads. These analyses show that early parliamentary regimes fought in significantly more wars than absolutist monarchies, both against one another and overall. Such regimes, we argue, had a relatively large capacity to make war, but, unlike modern democracies, not enough institutional constraints to prevent it. * We thank Christian Davenport, James Morrow, Roya Talibova, and seminar participants at George Washington University, the University of Michigan, and MPSA 2016 for valuable comments, and Michael Rochlitz for excellent data help. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation (grant SES-1227237) and the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan.

Introduction. Chapter 1. against South Korea and allied U.S. ground troops. China may pursue goals through weapons transfers, like the US and the USSR did from the 1950's through the 1980's. While the current system is more multipolar than the Cold War, most recipients still have relatively limited options. If arms are used for leverage, China is not a traditional supplier within the post-Cold War system. In this period, arms suppliers still engage in transfers for security reasons, but financial motivations loom larger. Since I want to understand contemporary arms sales, my study focuses on the time-frame immediately after the Cold War. Most studies of China's arms transfers focus on recipients, not on China itself. Between 1999 and 2006, China sold over 10 billion US dollars (USD) worth of arms to developing nations (Grimmet 2007). China does not just sell weapons to nations engaged in military hostilities, but nations that are routinely criticized by the international community, such as Sudan, Iran, and Myanmar. Human rights organizations claim China arms these regimes through weapons exports. Thereby, China not only stabilizes authoritarian rule but also escalates human rights abuses committed by these governments. 3 While NGOs blame China for strengthening dictatorships, they do not explain why it selects these countries to be arms recipients. If it uses weapons transfers as a political tool, China is fulfilling rational objectives, and just happens to be sowing the seeds of repression in the process. For example, China may use weapons as bargaining leverage to gain access rights to a state's natural resources. 4 If China uses arms transfers to gain natural resources, then its goal is not to strong-arm dictatorial regimes but to fulfill its domestic, natural resource demands. Still, China may unintentionally strengthen regimes hostile to the US through its arms 3 Amnesty International. (2006). China: secretive arms exports stroking conict and repression. 4 This is also known as arms-for-access, which I will explore in the next chapter.

Governments can use a variety of armed forces in civil war, including devolving violence to local unregulated actors even when they have regular armed forces available. To understand why states develop these risky security arrangements, I disaggregate the information challenges governments confront in civil conflict and explore the advantages of di↵erent types of security forces. I argue that how the central government allocates security is influenced by the challenges it faces, from monitoring its own security forces to collecting information on rebel activities and the local environment. Governments confronted with isolated subpopulations will rely more on localized and unregulated armed forces, who are better positioned to collect information on rebels within their communities. When needing to deploy troops far afield, governments mobilize more nationalized and regulated forces. I use novel panel data on internal security forces in civil conflict to evaluate these claims; my find...

How do governments organize internal power? What are the consequences of these actions for human rights? I explore the creation, evolution and repercussions of the state's organization of internal security, centering on the national government's competing needs to maximize control over security and minimize costs. I argue that legacies of violence in uence the state's organization of internal armed forces and the subsequent e ects of those organizations. Counterinsurgency campaigns and anti-colonial wars lead to the creation and expansion of local security, allowing governments with limited capacity and limited local area knowledge to engage in irregular warfare and population-centric operations. However, governments using local forces during domestic operations may be unable to demobilize them; these forces can remain long after wars end. The short-term strategic bene ts of local security forces undermine prospects for an enduring peace. In addition, I show that limited democratic constraints on national leaders will unintentionally encourage them to adopt centralized but publicly unaccountable security. This organization of force provides national leaders with the capability and command authority to engage in widespread repression against their own population. I test these arguments using an original global dataset on internal security forces that covers 198 countries from 1970 through 2011. The organization of internal security ultimately emerges from factors historical and immediate, domestic and international, and has lasting consequences on citizens within the state.

The Internet has long been considered a democratizing force, empowering citizens through unparalleled access to information. However, as citizens have adapted to and employed this new technology in protests against the state in China, Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere the state has fought back with their own effective strategies. Using cyber tools to carefully police online activity, halt protests, identify and arrest rebels, and block access to objectionable foreign websites, states have proven adept at advancing the technology of repression. This project will outline the dimensions of the cyber repression problem, offer context for cyber repression tactics in the broader realm of state repression, present examples of state-challenger cyber interactions, and conclude with a discussion of the relevant international human rights norms and initial policy solutions. Recent state responses to popular challenges in Ukraine, China and Russia suggest the rise of a new tactic by the state cyber r...

Japan's mandatory long-term care social insurance system started in 2000. Many important choices about the basic shape and size of the system, as well as a host of details, were necessary when the program was being planned. It represents a reversal from earlier steps toward a tax-...

In the 1980s, a wave of new–extremely clever and detailed–studies revolutionized the Japanese politics field. The empirical findings of this 'new paradigm' literature remain the conventional wisdom on Japanese policy-making patterns under the '1955 System'. In this paper, we ...

With regard to traditional social policy or the “welfare state in a narrow sense,” Japan is not as different from Western models as is usually assumed. With Long-Term-Care Insurance, it may soon start to look distinctive in the more expansive direction and perhaps become a ...

Recently, many developed countries have moved toward comprehensive Long-Term Care (LTC) systems. Along with the conventional explanations of these policy changes based on domestic factors, learning from abroad should be considered. We focus on the social insurance model of LTC, particularly how Japan learned from Germany and the Republic of Korea learned from Japan. Some approaches for how to think about policy learning in general as well as cross-border learning are suggested.i ssr_1346 63..80

The U.S. Congress is considering the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act, a voluntary insurance program that would help pay for long-term services and supports to disabled Americans. In Germany and Japan, social insurance programs are universal, support family caregivers, and allow individuals considerable flexibility in securing the services they require. We explored differences between Germany and Japan in program goals, eligibility process, scope, size, and sustainability for possible applications in the United States. Moreover, when we compared public spending on longterm care, we found that spending in the United States is actually higher than in Germany even now, prior to enactment of the CLASS Act, and is only slightly lower than in Japan. T wenty years ago, policy for care of frail older people in Germany and Japan was much like it is in the United States today. Programs financed mostly from tax revenues provided means-tested access to nursing homes and, in some areas, to a few community-based services such as home help. Today, Germany and Japan have universal, comprehensive long-term care systems based on social insurance. A variation on this model is now under consideration in the U.S. Congress, in the form of the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act, a national voluntary insurance program that would help pay for long-term services and supports to some disabled Americans. In this article we argue that an even broader program of universal long-term care insurance is a practical and affordable solution to problems of coverage and fairness, and we describe differences between the German and Japanese programs that illustrate some important policy choices. Public Long-Term Care Spending Compared We start with a look at what Germany, Japan, and the United States spend on long-term care. Cross-national data compilations that allow separation of spending on the elderly are not available, so we compiled basic data on long-term care spending using best available data from 2005, the latest year with complete data for Germany and Japan. 1-6 We adjusted these data to exclude spending for people under age sixty-five in the United States and Germany, by referring to unpublished data or estimating on the basis of the best information available. (In Japan the official data are broken down by age.) 7,8 We did our best to define consistent categories across the three countries, again estimating in a few cases. For example, there are no official data on long-term care provided in hospitals and paid by health insurance in Japan. In some instances, we consulted the officials or experts who had compiled the data we used to ensure that our estimates were reasonable. To maintain comparability among the countries, we excluded most Medicare postacute spending, because it would be regarded as med

As Japan's economy declined, more intensive control of prices and even volume through the fee schedule, plus increases in various copayment rates, led to an actual reduction of medical spending in 2002 for the first time in history. To augment established mechanisms of cost containment, case-mix-based inclusive fees for inpatient care were introduced in university hospitals in 2003 and are planned for subacute and long-term care. However, substantial reform, including the introduction of market-based medicine, is not likely to occur in other areas. Progress in making the delivery system more accountable to patients has been meaningful but slow. N at i o na l h e a lt h s p e n di n g i n ja pan decreased in fiscal year 2002 for the first time in history. The cut was achieved not by radical restructuring but by relying on traditional measures. In the 2002 regular biennial review, prices of medical services and drugs were cut by an average of 2.7 percent, which led to a change in overall health spending of-0.7 percent. 1 Also, several reform proposals were aimed at efficiency in the payment structure, health insurance system, and medical care delivery, prompted by economic stagnation. Another concern was the criticism that Japan's health care system is insufficiently accountable. Before describing current and proposed reforms, this paper describes the context in which the recent reduction was achieved. More detailed descriptions of the Japanese health care system have been published elsewhere. 2 Trends In Medical Spending And Prices Exhibit 1 shows the annual percentage increases in Japan's gross domestic product (GDP), national medical expenditures (NME), and average medical prices as established by the national fee schedule. NME is the amount calculated by the government for all medical services funded by the public health insurance system 2 6 M a y / J u n e 2 0 0 4 C o s t s & C o m p e t i t i o n

In a previous editorial, William Hsiao (2007) stressed the importance of the political economy in shaping health policy decisions. The medical axis-ofpower, the close alliance of the health bureaucracy, hospitals directors, and physicians have so much power in China that, despite the wishes of the Politburo to provide affordable and accessible health care for all and reduce medical impoverishment, new resources may only go to 'a bloated bureaucracy and as higher income for the medical staff, more staffing, and reduced workload'. This possibility is by no means confined to China. Indeed, this criticism could also be directed to the recent increases in expenditures for the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) (Maynard, 2007). However, Hsiao also stressed that reform cannot succeed without obtaining the cooperation of the medical axis-of-power. In Japan, we believe that the policy decision to strictly limit the establishment of public hospitals, the government's proactive role in expanding coverage, and the control of virtually all medical spending via a universal fee schedule have been the three key factors in realizing universal coverage and containing costs to the lowest level among the G7 countries (

Abstract: Recent explanations for the rise of democracy have emphasized the role of inequality. Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) and Boix (2003) view democracy as a solution to a commitment problem faced by autocratic leaders, who are members of a society's elite. Elites would like to commit to redistribute sufficient amounts of wealth tomorrow to deter democratic revolt by the masses today.