“Intended and Unintended Consequences of Democracy Promotion Assistance to Georgia after the Rose Revolution.”

Social Sciences Building (SSB), Room 107.

What are the political consequences of democratization assistance to regimes transitioning from authoritarian rule? By exploiting the downstream effects of a field experiment designed to encourage citizen monitoring of Georgia's 2008 Parliamentary Elections, Jesse Driscoll and F. Daniel Hidalgo evaluate the political consequences of one type of democracy promotion aid.

The intervention increased citizen activism, but it also had the unanticipated effect of suppressing overall voter turnout by approximately 5%. Driscoll and Hidalgo hypothesize that the civic education campaign was interpreted as a sign of increased political attention to a selected voting precinct, which suppressed opposition turnout. Two additional experiments provide additional evidence for the hypothesis.

Jesse Driscoll is an assistant professor of Political Science at IR/PS. His primary area of interest is mapping the processes by which hierarchies emerge after periods of violence. His forthcoming book, Liquidation Lotteries: Warlords & Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States, examines mechanisms of civil war settlement after state failure in Georgia and Tajikistan. His work has been published in The Journal of Conflict Resolution and The Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology.

The 2013-2014 International Relations Speaker Series at UC San Diego is sponsored jointly by the Project on International Affairs (PIA) at the Institute for International, Comparative and Area Studies (IICAS), and the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation (ILAR) at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS).

Info: [email protected].