Ryan C Briggs
Biographic Data
| ID | 138498 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ryan C Briggs |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ryan C |
| FAMILY NAME | Briggs |
| SIGNATURE | BRIGGS R C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Guelph |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3933-8119 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 233 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Quantitative Political Science Research Is Greatly Underpowered
The social sciences face a replicability crisis. A key determinant of replication success is statistical power. We assess the power of political science research by collating over 16,000 hypothesis tests from about 2,000 articles in 46 areas of the discipline. Under generous assumptions, we show that quantitative research in political science is greatly underpowered: the median analysis has about 10% power, and only about 1 in 10 tests have at le…
Beliefs, Values, and Practices in Development Studies
This article uses a survey of Development Studies (DS) professors and students in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom to answer three questions about academic DS. DS is defined in part by a commitment to improve the world, and the first questions ask if the respondents believe that DS lives up to this defining criteria. The second group of questions asks about the ethical commitments of DS academics and how these commitments inform …
Incentivizing Responses in International Organization Elite Surveys: Evidence from the World Bank
Scholars of International Organizations (IOs) increasingly use elite surveys to study the preferences and decisions of policymakers. When designing these surveys, one central concern is low statistical power, because respondents are typically recruited from a small and inaccessible population. However, much of what we know about how to incentivize elites to participate in surveys is based on anecdotal reflections, rather than systematic evidence …
Changes in Perceptions of Border Security Influence Desired Levels of Immigration
Security concerns about immigration are on the rise. Many countries respond by fortifying their borders. Yet little is known about the influence of border security measures on perceived threat from immigration. Borders might facilitate group identities and spread fear of outsiders. In contrast, they might enhance citizens’ sense of security and control over immigration. We test these claims using survey experiments run on a quota sample of over 1…
Power to which people? Explaining how electrification targets voters across party rotations in Ghana
Why Does Aid Not Target the Poorest
Foreign-aid projects typically have local effects, so they need to be placed close to the poor if they are to reduce poverty. I show that, conditional on local population levels, World Bank (WB) project aid targets richer parts of countries. This relationship holds over time and across world regions. I test five donor-side explanations for pro-rich targeting using a pre-registered conjoint experiment on WB Task Team Leaders (TTLs). TTLs perceive …
Canadians Think that Nearly All of Us Will Be Allowed Back to Work around August
Business closures and work-from-home orders have been a central part of Canada's plan to slow the spread of COVID-19. The success of these measures hinges on public support, which cannot be taken for granted as the orders induce considerable economic pain. As governments consider when to re-open the economy, one relevant variable is when the public expects the economy to re-open. At minimum, if public perceptions differ from government plans then…
Receiving Foreign Aid Can Reduce Support for Incumbent Presidents
Foreign aid is thought to be useful, and therefore desirable, to recipient governments because it allows them to increase their support through the provision of goods or services. However, the effect of the provision of aid on vote choice has rarely been directly tested. I examine the effect of receiving foreign aid on incumbent electoral support in three African countries using a spatial difference in differences design. Surprisingly, receiving …
Measuring and explaining formal institutional persistence in French West Africa
Colonial institutions are thought to be highly persistent, but measuring that persistence is difficult. Using a text analysis method that allows us to measure similarity between bodies of text, we examine the extent to which one formal institution - the penal code - has retained colonial language in seven West African countries. We find that the contemporary penal codes of most countries retain little colonial language. Additionally, we find that…
Underpowered: Rolling blackouts in Africa disproportionately hurt the poor
Electricity demand exceeds supply in many parts of Africa, and this often results in rolling blackouts. This article argues that blackouts tend to concentrate on poorer places within countries, due to both economic and political factors. This argument is tested with an analysis of electricity availability across thirty-two neighborhoods in Accra and survey data from thirty-six African countries. Across these analyses, poorer people with a grid co…
Gender and location in African politics scholarship: The other white man’s burden
African Affairs, 115/460, 466–489 In the original article, an error in a statistical script (namely the inclusion of both a time variable and a set of year dummies) produced nonsensical values for some of the time variables reported in Tables 2 and 4. Dropping this erroneously entered time variable does not change any of the other variable coefficients in the OLS models, and doing so introduces only minor changes to the negative binomial model re…
Poor targeting: A gridded spatial analysis of the degree to which aid reaches the poor in Africa
Explaining case selection in African politics research
It is common to test general claims about politics in Africa with evidence from a small number of countries. This note examines patterns in the countries of study in two Anglophone African politics journals over two decades. Countries with larger populations are studied more, while former French colonies are under-represented. There is no bias towards former-British colonies once one controls for population and former-French colonial status. Thes…
Does Foreign Aid Target the Poorest
To examine the extent to which foreign aid reaches people at different levels of wealth in Africa, I use household surveys to measure the subnational distribution of a country's population by wealth quintiles and match this information to data on the location of aid projects from two multilateral donors. Within countries, aid disproportionately flows to regions with more of the richest people. Aid does not favor regions with more of the poorest p…
Gender and location in African politics scholarship: The other white man's burden
While the percentage of women publishing in African Affairs and The Journal of Modern African Studies from 1993 until 2013 has increased, the percentage of articles by Africa-based authors has declined. We present evidence suggesting that this decline is not being driven by lower submission rates from Africa but rather by low and declining acceptance rates. We also find that Africa-based scholars, but not women, are systematically cited less than…
Legal Families Without the Laws: The Fading of Colonial Law in French West Africa
Colonization has created a unique opportunity to test the endurance of legal transplants. Using a sample of seven former French colonies in West Africa, we examine how much of the colonial penal code has been retained by modern countries. This is done using a computer program that matches each article from the colonial code to the article most similar to it in each contemporary code. This novel algorithmic approach allows us to undertake millions…
Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond
Neopatrimonialism has become a catch-all explanation for state dysfunction and failed development in Africa. While serving this role, the concept has become “stretched,” to use Giovanni Satrori's term from his essay on comparative methodology in The American Political Science Review some 45 years ago. This has resulted in a concept that is mostly confined to Africa but that within Africa is applied to a very broad range of phenomena. The concept'…
The Influence of Aid Changes on African Election Outcomes
Many African democracies experience highly variable aid flows. This article examines the influence of aid changes on presidential incumbent advantage in Africa. Aid changes influence the odds of incumbents winning reelection, with aid increases helping incumbents, but this effect is only present when the aid change occurs in the year before an election. Aid changes in earlier or later time periods have no influence. Case studies of elections in G…
Aiding and Abetting: Project Aid and Ethnic Politics in Kenya
Electrifying the base? Aid and incumbent advantage in Ghana
In 1999, the year before Ghana's 2000 election, the country experienced a large, unexpected decline in aid. The incumbent National Democratic Congress (NDC) lost the election. Did the decline in aid hurt the NDC at the polls, or was it simply incidental? Using data from a national, World Bank-funded electrification project, this article shows that the NDC was able to allocate aid according to explicitly political criteria. The article also exploi…
Does Foreign Aid Target the Poorest
To examine the extent to which foreign aid reaches people at different levels of wealth in Africa, I use household surveys to measure the subnational distribution of a country's population by wealth quintiles and match this information to data on the location of aid projects from two multilateral donors. Within countries, aid disproportionately flows to regions with more of the richest people. Aid does not favor regions with more of the poorest p…
Aiding and Abetting: Project Aid and Ethnic Politics in Kenya
Electrifying the base? Aid and incumbent advantage in Ghana
In 1999, the year before Ghana's 2000 election, the country experienced a large, unexpected decline in aid. The incumbent National Democratic Congress (NDC) lost the election. Did the decline in aid hurt the NDC at the polls, or was it simply incidental? Using data from a national, World Bank-funded electrification project, this article shows that the NDC was able to allocate aid according to explicitly political criteria. The article also exploi…
Why Does Aid Not Target the Poorest
Foreign-aid projects typically have local effects, so they need to be placed close to the poor if they are to reduce poverty. I show that, conditional on local population levels, World Bank (WB) project aid targets richer parts of countries. This relationship holds over time and across world regions. I test five donor-side explanations for pro-rich targeting using a pre-registered conjoint experiment on WB Task Team Leaders (TTLs). TTLs perceive …
Poor targeting: A gridded spatial analysis of the degree to which aid reaches the poor in Africa
Gender and location in African politics scholarship: The other white man's burden
While the percentage of women publishing in African Affairs and The Journal of Modern African Studies from 1993 until 2013 has increased, the percentage of articles by Africa-based authors has declined. We present evidence suggesting that this decline is not being driven by lower submission rates from Africa but rather by low and declining acceptance rates. We also find that Africa-based scholars, but not women, are systematically cited less than…
Receiving Foreign Aid Can Reduce Support for Incumbent Presidents
Foreign aid is thought to be useful, and therefore desirable, to recipient governments because it allows them to increase their support through the provision of goods or services. However, the effect of the provision of aid on vote choice has rarely been directly tested. I examine the effect of receiving foreign aid on incumbent electoral support in three African countries using a spatial difference in differences design. Surprisingly, receiving …
Quantitative Political Science Research Is Greatly Underpowered
The social sciences face a replicability crisis. A key determinant of replication success is statistical power. We assess the power of political science research by collating over 16,000 hypothesis tests from about 2,000 articles in 46 areas of the discipline. Under generous assumptions, we show that quantitative research in political science is greatly underpowered: the median analysis has about 10% power, and only about 1 in 10 tests have at le…
The Influence of Aid Changes on African Election Outcomes
Many African democracies experience highly variable aid flows. This article examines the influence of aid changes on presidential incumbent advantage in Africa. Aid changes influence the odds of incumbents winning reelection, with aid increases helping incumbents, but this effect is only present when the aid change occurs in the year before an election. Aid changes in earlier or later time periods have no influence. Case studies of elections in G…
Incentivizing Responses in International Organization Elite Surveys: Evidence from the World Bank
Scholars of International Organizations (IOs) increasingly use elite surveys to study the preferences and decisions of policymakers. When designing these surveys, one central concern is low statistical power, because respondents are typically recruited from a small and inaccessible population. However, much of what we know about how to incentivize elites to participate in surveys is based on anecdotal reflections, rather than systematic evidence …
Underpowered: Rolling blackouts in Africa disproportionately hurt the poor
Electricity demand exceeds supply in many parts of Africa, and this often results in rolling blackouts. This article argues that blackouts tend to concentrate on poorer places within countries, due to both economic and political factors. This argument is tested with an analysis of electricity availability across thirty-two neighborhoods in Accra and survey data from thirty-six African countries. Across these analyses, poorer people with a grid co…
Explaining case selection in African politics research
It is common to test general claims about politics in Africa with evidence from a small number of countries. This note examines patterns in the countries of study in two Anglophone African politics journals over two decades. Countries with larger populations are studied more, while former French colonies are under-represented. There is no bias towards former-British colonies once one controls for population and former-French colonial status. Thes…
Changes in Perceptions of Border Security Influence Desired Levels of Immigration
Security concerns about immigration are on the rise. Many countries respond by fortifying their borders. Yet little is known about the influence of border security measures on perceived threat from immigration. Borders might facilitate group identities and spread fear of outsiders. In contrast, they might enhance citizens’ sense of security and control over immigration. We test these claims using survey experiments run on a quota sample of over 1…
Power to which people? Explaining how electrification targets voters across party rotations in Ghana
Canadians Think that Nearly All of Us Will Be Allowed Back to Work around August
Business closures and work-from-home orders have been a central part of Canada's plan to slow the spread of COVID-19. The success of these measures hinges on public support, which cannot be taken for granted as the orders induce considerable economic pain. As governments consider when to re-open the economy, one relevant variable is when the public expects the economy to re-open. At minimum, if public perceptions differ from government plans then…
Measuring and explaining formal institutional persistence in French West Africa
Colonial institutions are thought to be highly persistent, but measuring that persistence is difficult. Using a text analysis method that allows us to measure similarity between bodies of text, we examine the extent to which one formal institution - the penal code - has retained colonial language in seven West African countries. We find that the contemporary penal codes of most countries retain little colonial language. Additionally, we find that…
Gender and location in African politics scholarship: The other white man’s burden
African Affairs, 115/460, 466–489 In the original article, an error in a statistical script (namely the inclusion of both a time variable and a set of year dummies) produced nonsensical values for some of the time variables reported in Tables 2 and 4. Dropping this erroneously entered time variable does not change any of the other variable coefficients in the OLS models, and doing so introduces only minor changes to the negative binomial model re…
Legal Families Without the Laws: The Fading of Colonial Law in French West Africa
Colonization has created a unique opportunity to test the endurance of legal transplants. Using a sample of seven former French colonies in West Africa, we examine how much of the colonial penal code has been retained by modern countries. This is done using a computer program that matches each article from the colonial code to the article most similar to it in each contemporary code. This novel algorithmic approach allows us to undertake millions…
Electrifying the base? Aid and incumbent advantage in Ghana
In 1999, the year before Ghana's 2000 election, the country experienced a large, unexpected decline in aid. The incumbent National Democratic Congress (NDC) lost the election. Did the decline in aid hurt the NDC at the polls, or was it simply incidental? Using data from a national, World Bank-funded electrification project, this article shows that the NDC was able to allocate aid according to explicitly political criteria. The article also exploi…
Aiding and Abetting: Project Aid and Ethnic Politics in Kenya
Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond
Neopatrimonialism has become a catch-all explanation for state dysfunction and failed development in Africa. While serving this role, the concept has become “stretched,” to use Giovanni Satrori's term from his essay on comparative methodology in The American Political Science Review some 45 years ago. This has resulted in a concept that is mostly confined to Africa but that within Africa is applied to a very broad range of phenomena. The concept'…
The Influence of Aid Changes on African Election Outcomes
Many African democracies experience highly variable aid flows. This article examines the influence of aid changes on presidential incumbent advantage in Africa. Aid changes influence the odds of incumbents winning reelection, with aid increases helping incumbents, but this effect is only present when the aid change occurs in the year before an election. Aid changes in earlier or later time periods have no influence. Case studies of elections in G…
Gender and location in African politics scholarship: The other white man's burden
While the percentage of women publishing in African Affairs and The Journal of Modern African Studies from 1993 until 2013 has increased, the percentage of articles by Africa-based authors has declined. We present evidence suggesting that this decline is not being driven by lower submission rates from Africa but rather by low and declining acceptance rates. We also find that Africa-based scholars, but not women, are systematically cited less than…
Legal Families Without the Laws: The Fading of Colonial Law in French West Africa
Colonization has created a unique opportunity to test the endurance of legal transplants. Using a sample of seven former French colonies in West Africa, we examine how much of the colonial penal code has been retained by modern countries. This is done using a computer program that matches each article from the colonial code to the article most similar to it in each contemporary code. This novel algorithmic approach allows us to undertake millions…
Poor targeting: A gridded spatial analysis of the degree to which aid reaches the poor in Africa
Explaining case selection in African politics research
It is common to test general claims about politics in Africa with evidence from a small number of countries. This note examines patterns in the countries of study in two Anglophone African politics journals over two decades. Countries with larger populations are studied more, while former French colonies are under-represented. There is no bias towards former-British colonies once one controls for population and former-French colonial status. Thes…
Does Foreign Aid Target the Poorest
To examine the extent to which foreign aid reaches people at different levels of wealth in Africa, I use household surveys to measure the subnational distribution of a country's population by wealth quintiles and match this information to data on the location of aid projects from two multilateral donors. Within countries, aid disproportionately flows to regions with more of the richest people. Aid does not favor regions with more of the poorest p…
Gender and location in African politics scholarship: The other white man’s burden
African Affairs, 115/460, 466–489 In the original article, an error in a statistical script (namely the inclusion of both a time variable and a set of year dummies) produced nonsensical values for some of the time variables reported in Tables 2 and 4. Dropping this erroneously entered time variable does not change any of the other variable coefficients in the OLS models, and doing so introduces only minor changes to the negative binomial model re…
Receiving Foreign Aid Can Reduce Support for Incumbent Presidents
Foreign aid is thought to be useful, and therefore desirable, to recipient governments because it allows them to increase their support through the provision of goods or services. However, the effect of the provision of aid on vote choice has rarely been directly tested. I examine the effect of receiving foreign aid on incumbent electoral support in three African countries using a spatial difference in differences design. Surprisingly, receiving …
Measuring and explaining formal institutional persistence in French West Africa
Colonial institutions are thought to be highly persistent, but measuring that persistence is difficult. Using a text analysis method that allows us to measure similarity between bodies of text, we examine the extent to which one formal institution - the penal code - has retained colonial language in seven West African countries. We find that the contemporary penal codes of most countries retain little colonial language. Additionally, we find that…
Underpowered: Rolling blackouts in Africa disproportionately hurt the poor
Electricity demand exceeds supply in many parts of Africa, and this often results in rolling blackouts. This article argues that blackouts tend to concentrate on poorer places within countries, due to both economic and political factors. This argument is tested with an analysis of electricity availability across thirty-two neighborhoods in Accra and survey data from thirty-six African countries. Across these analyses, poorer people with a grid co…
Canadians Think that Nearly All of Us Will Be Allowed Back to Work around August
Business closures and work-from-home orders have been a central part of Canada's plan to slow the spread of COVID-19. The success of these measures hinges on public support, which cannot be taken for granted as the orders induce considerable economic pain. As governments consider when to re-open the economy, one relevant variable is when the public expects the economy to re-open. At minimum, if public perceptions differ from government plans then…
Power to which people? Explaining how electrification targets voters across party rotations in Ghana
Why Does Aid Not Target the Poorest
Foreign-aid projects typically have local effects, so they need to be placed close to the poor if they are to reduce poverty. I show that, conditional on local population levels, World Bank (WB) project aid targets richer parts of countries. This relationship holds over time and across world regions. I test five donor-side explanations for pro-rich targeting using a pre-registered conjoint experiment on WB Task Team Leaders (TTLs). TTLs perceive …
Beliefs, Values, and Practices in Development Studies
This article uses a survey of Development Studies (DS) professors and students in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom to answer three questions about academic DS. DS is defined in part by a commitment to improve the world, and the first questions ask if the respondents believe that DS lives up to this defining criteria. The second group of questions asks about the ethical commitments of DS academics and how these commitments inform …
Incentivizing Responses in International Organization Elite Surveys: Evidence from the World Bank
Scholars of International Organizations (IOs) increasingly use elite surveys to study the preferences and decisions of policymakers. When designing these surveys, one central concern is low statistical power, because respondents are typically recruited from a small and inaccessible population. However, much of what we know about how to incentivize elites to participate in surveys is based on anecdotal reflections, rather than systematic evidence …
Changes in Perceptions of Border Security Influence Desired Levels of Immigration
Security concerns about immigration are on the rise. Many countries respond by fortifying their borders. Yet little is known about the influence of border security measures on perceived threat from immigration. Borders might facilitate group identities and spread fear of outsiders. In contrast, they might enhance citizens’ sense of security and control over immigration. We test these claims using survey experiments run on a quota sample of over 1…
Quantitative Political Science Research Is Greatly Underpowered
The social sciences face a replicability crisis. A key determinant of replication success is statistical power. We assess the power of political science research by collating over 16,000 hypothesis tests from about 2,000 articles in 46 areas of the discipline. Under generous assumptions, we show that quantitative research in political science is greatly underpowered: the median analysis has about 10% power, and only about 1 in 10 tests have at le…
Political science (17 works) · Economics (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · International Development and Aid (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Economic growth (8 works) · Aid effectiveness (7 works) · Business (7 works) · Developing country (7 works)