About this Event
Date: Monday, October 26
Time: 10 AM - 11:30 PM
Location: AQ 6106, SFU Burnaby campus
About the Event
How do fraught elections shape social trust? The legacy of political violence – particularly surrounding elections – has substantially transformed Zimbabwe’s social landscape.
The talk explores the theory of fraught elections in authoritarian regimes, measuring how those elections affect social trust. To test the expectations, it leverages randomized household surveys conducted before and after the 2023 elections, as well as a series of semi-structured interviews with key civil society actors. The surveys, run in multiple communities, demonstrate that responses to questions about four different types of social trust all register large and statistically significant decreases in the post-election period. The interviews expand this by demonstrating that elections reshape social incentives by making access to patronage contingent on support for the ruling party. This reduces trust. The research finds that this decrease in trust is robust to additional tests against endogeneity, omitted variable bias, and imputed partisanship data.
About the Speaker
Jacob S. Lewis is the Sam Reed Distinguished Associate Professor at Washington State University’s School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs. He specializes in Comparative Politics and International Development. His work generally centers on African politics, social movements and conflict processes, and peace-building.
He also has a keen interest in examining the political origins of antisemitism in countries with large Jewish diasporas. His work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Political Behavior, Political Psychology, and Political Geography.
Lewis was awarded the Best Article of 2021 in Political Studies Review by the journal’s editorial staff. He has worked as Program Manager with Management Systems International and Associates in Rural Development in Washington, DC, specializing in programs in democratic rule of law, natural resource management, and post-conflict stabilization in Africa and the Middle East. He has also helped to manage an Africa-oriented governance program at Global Integrity and served as a Research Fellow with the Center for Open Data Enterprise.
Contact
If you have any queries about the event, please reach out to us at [email protected]
Event venue & nearby stays
Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive West, Burnaby, Canada
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