Karen E Ferree
Biographic Data
| ID | 170189 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Karen E Ferree |
| GIVEN NAMES | Karen E |
| FAMILY NAME | Ferree |
| SIGNATURE | FERREE K E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9294-7784 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 526 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Project diplomacy: Do development project characteristics shape perceptions of China and its efforts in Africa
China has significantly increased its presence across Africa over the past decades. This engagement is commonly considered to build soft power through ‘project diplomacy’, i.e. influencing public perceptions through infrastructure construction. We evaluate whether the attributes of a project shape public opinion. We hypothesise that a project that employs local labour and management, has minimal costly impacts, and secures positive endorsements b…
Using Communications Technology to Promote Democratic Participation: Experimental Evidence from South Africa
We present a national-scale effort to use technology to promote political participation in an emerging democracy, South Africa. A multichannel digital platform registering more than 90,000 South African citizens conducted opinion polling, crowdsourced information on electoral activities, and enabled citizen monitoring of polling places during the 2014 general election. Different channels display starkly distinct demographic profiles and patterns …
Symptoms and Stereotypes: Perceptions and Responses to Covid-19 in Malawi and Zambia
A large literature documents Covid-19’s health and economic effects. We focus instead on its political impact and its potential to exacerbate identity divisions, in particular. Psychologists argue that contagious disease increases threat perceptions and provokes policing of group boundaries. We explore how insider-outsider status and symptoms of illness shape perceptions of infection, reported willingness to help, and desire to restrict free move…
Land and Legibility: When Do Citizens Expect Secure Property Rights in Weak States
Legibility and political authority are often conflated in debates over formalization processes, including land titling. This can lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is that citizens anticipate would strengthen their property rights. This study examines the effects of legibility on citizens' evaluations of property rights in Malawi, a country with limited but increasing land titling. We argue that legibility is a strategic resource f…
Choice and Choice Set in African Elections
Studies of voting behavior usually start with voters, theorizing how voter psychology or preferences shape choice. But what if choice sets predetermine choice? This article argues for a reorientation of how we think about voting behavior, from an exclusive focus on microfoundations to one acknowledging structure. It does so through the lens of African coethnic voting. Using data sets matching vote choice with candidate characteristics in Kenyan, …
Mixed records, complexity, and ethnic voting in African elections
Stigma, Trust, and procedural integrity: Covid-19 testing in Malawi
The ABCs of Covid-19 prevention in Malawi: Authority, benefits, and costs of compliance
Election Ink and Turnout in a Partial Democracy
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Why the salience of social divisions matters in party systems: Testing the interactive hypothesis in South Africa
Scholars have long argued social diversity, and electoral institutions interactively shape party systems: diversity has little effect on the effective number of parties (ENP) in single member plurality (SMP) systems but increases ENP in proportional ones. We argue instead that where diversity is salient enough to generate demand for parties, it also hinders strategic coordination, preventing SMP rules from reducing the number of parties and produ…
Electoral Systems in Context: South Africa
South Africa’s post-apartheid election outcomes demonstrate how contextual factors interact with electoral rules to shape party systems. South Africa’s national electoral system represents one of the most permissive in the world, combining parliamentary rules with an extreme form of proportional representation. These rules were selected to encourage broad representation of parties in the National Assembly. However, South Africa’s party system con…
Who’s Asking? Interviewer Coethnicity Effects in African Survey Data
Face-to-face interviews constitute a social interaction between interviewer and respondent, and in the African context, social interactions are strongly shaped by ethnicity. Yet research using African survey data typically fails to account for the effect of shared ethnicity on survey responses. We find that respondents give systematically different answers to coethnic and noncoethnic interviewers across surveys in 14 African countries, but with s…
Gifts, threats, and perceptions of ballot secrecy in African elections
Are contingent electoral strategies, like vote buying and intimidation, effective in Africa? No, according to recent scholarship: unlike parties in other developing regions like Latin America, African parties lack the capacity to violate ballot secrecy and force voters to stick to their end of the bargain. Voters can therefore “defect” and vote their conscience. We challenge this perspective. Recent Afrobarometer data show that nearly one in four…
Context, Electoral Rules, and Party Systems
To address concerns over the applicability of the electoral system literature to new and developing democracies, we present a framework for understanding the interplay between electoral rules and social, economic, and political context. This framework emphasizes that context typically shapes what we call the “behavioral” linkage between electoral rules and outcomes; moreover, the longer the causal chain connecting electoral rules to outcomes, the…
Voting behavior and electoral irregularities in Kenya's 2013 Election
Data from a unique nationwide exit poll of 6258 voters are employed to explore two central themes of the 2013 Kenyan Election: (1) the correlates of individual vote choice; and (2) the credibility of the electoral process. The analysis reveals several striking relationships between an individual's vote choice, personal attributes, and perceptions of the campaign and candidates. We find that the leading coalitions mostly kept their co-ethnics toge…
Between Science and Engineering: Reflections on the Apsa Presidential Task Force on Political Science, Electoral Rules, and Democratic Governance
Political scientists have contributed to the world of electoral systems as scientists and as engineers. Taking stock of recent scientific research, we show that context modifies the effects of electoral rules on political outcomes in specific and systematic ways. We explore how electoral rules shape the inclusion of women and minorities, the depth and nature of political competition, and patterns of redistribution and regulation, and we consider …
Kenya’s 2013 Elections: Choosing Peace over Democracy
Kenya's 2013 Elections:Choosing Peace over Democracy James D. Long (bio), Karuti Kanyinga (bio), Karen E. Ferree (bio), and Clark Gibson (bio) On 4 March 2013, roughly 12.3 million voters went to the polls in Kenya. After a protracted counting process with clear irregularities, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) declared sitting deputy prime minister Uhuru Kenyatta of The National Alliance (TNA) and the Jubilee Coalition t…
How Fluid Is Fluid? The Mutability of Ethnic Identities and Electoral Volatility in Africa
This chapter proposes and tests an argument about how much fluidity we should expect in activated ethnic identity categories in electoral politics. It has now become commonplace to assert that ethnic identities are constructed, fluid, and responsive to political, social, and economic contexts including elections. But how fluid are they? How easily can political entrepreneurs fighting elections construct new ethnic groupings? Not very easily, this…
Framing the Race in South Africa: The Political Origins of Racial Census Elections
Ties that bind? The rise and decline of ethno-regional partisanship in Malawi, 1994–2009
In the first three elections following Malawi's return to democracy in 1993, voting patterns displayed a clear ethno-regional pattern. Then in 2009 the regional pattern broke down in dramatic fashion, with the incumbent President, Bingu wa Mutharika, attracting majority support across all three regions. This article first examines whether ethnic identities were at the root of Malawi's ethno-regional electoral pattern. Our tests show that while et…
The Social Origins of Electoral Volatility in Africa
This article utilizes the statistical analysis of an original dataset of African legislative seat volatility levels and three case studies to demonstrate that the size and configuration of politically salient ethnic groups bear a strong relationship with patterns of legislative seat volatility in Africa. Legislative seat volatility is highest in countries where either no social group is large enough to form a majority on its own, or a majority gr…
Transformation and Trouble: Crime, Justice, and Participation in Democratic South Africa
Transformation and Trouble: Crime, Justice, and Participation in Democratic South Africa. By Diana Gordon. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006. 400p. $78.00 cloth, $28.95 paper. When the African National Congress (ANC) took power in South Africa after the first open elections in 1994, the goals of its leaders were ambitious: In addition to securing liberal rights and institutions, the party sought to address the socioeconomic needs …
Institutional duration and growth in Africa
Explaining South Africa's Racial Census
In all South African elections since 1994, race has been an overwhelming predictor of voting behavior for most of the South African electorate. This paper evaluates three explanations for this outcome: an expressive hypothesis, which sees voting as an act of identity expression; a politics-as-usual approach, which points to standard factors like policy preferences or performance evaluations; and a racial heuristics approach, which suggests that v…
Iterative Approaches toR×CEcological Inference Problems: Where They Can Go Wrong and One Quick Fix
This article argues that a key step in King's iterative approach toR×Cecological inference problems—the aggregation of groups into broad conglomerate categories—can introduce problems of aggregation bias and multimodality into data, inducing model violations. As a result, iterative EI estimates can be considerably biased, even when the original data conform to the assumptions of the model. I demonstrate this problem intuitively and through simula…
Explaining South Africa's Racial Census
In all South African elections since 1994, race has been an overwhelming predictor of voting behavior for most of the South African electorate. This paper evaluates three explanations for this outcome: an expressive hypothesis, which sees voting as an act of identity expression; a politics-as-usual approach, which points to standard factors like policy preferences or performance evaluations; and a racial heuristics approach, which suggests that v…
Fiscal Policy Outcomes and Electoral Accountability in American States
Clear fiscal policy effects appear in American state gubernatorial and legislative elections between 1968 and 1992, independent of the effects of incumbency, coattails, term limits, and macroeconomic conditions. The results show that accountability is generally stronger following a period of unified party control than under divided government. Voter reactions to taxes and spending relative to the state economy are conditional on expectations, whi…
Who’s Asking? Interviewer Coethnicity Effects in African Survey Data
Face-to-face interviews constitute a social interaction between interviewer and respondent, and in the African context, social interactions are strongly shaped by ethnicity. Yet research using African survey data typically fails to account for the effect of shared ethnicity on survey responses. We find that respondents give systematically different answers to coethnic and noncoethnic interviewers across surveys in 14 African countries, but with s…
Ties that bind? The rise and decline of ethno-regional partisanship in Malawi, 1994–2009
In the first three elections following Malawi's return to democracy in 1993, voting patterns displayed a clear ethno-regional pattern. Then in 2009 the regional pattern broke down in dramatic fashion, with the incumbent President, Bingu wa Mutharika, attracting majority support across all three regions. This article first examines whether ethnic identities were at the root of Malawi's ethno-regional electoral pattern. Our tests show that while et…
The Social Origins of Electoral Volatility in Africa
This article utilizes the statistical analysis of an original dataset of African legislative seat volatility levels and three case studies to demonstrate that the size and configuration of politically salient ethnic groups bear a strong relationship with patterns of legislative seat volatility in Africa. Legislative seat volatility is highest in countries where either no social group is large enough to form a majority on its own, or a majority gr…
Context, Electoral Rules, and Party Systems
To address concerns over the applicability of the electoral system literature to new and developing democracies, we present a framework for understanding the interplay between electoral rules and social, economic, and political context. This framework emphasizes that context typically shapes what we call the “behavioral” linkage between electoral rules and outcomes; moreover, the longer the causal chain connecting electoral rules to outcomes, the…
Voting behavior and electoral irregularities in Kenya's 2013 Election
Data from a unique nationwide exit poll of 6258 voters are employed to explore two central themes of the 2013 Kenyan Election: (1) the correlates of individual vote choice; and (2) the credibility of the electoral process. The analysis reveals several striking relationships between an individual's vote choice, personal attributes, and perceptions of the campaign and candidates. We find that the leading coalitions mostly kept their co-ethnics toge…
Kenya’s 2013 Elections: Choosing Peace over Democracy
Kenya's 2013 Elections:Choosing Peace over Democracy James D. Long (bio), Karuti Kanyinga (bio), Karen E. Ferree (bio), and Clark Gibson (bio) On 4 March 2013, roughly 12.3 million voters went to the polls in Kenya. After a protracted counting process with clear irregularities, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) declared sitting deputy prime minister Uhuru Kenyatta of The National Alliance (TNA) and the Jubilee Coalition t…
Election Ink and Turnout in a Partial Democracy
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Why the salience of social divisions matters in party systems: Testing the interactive hypothesis in South Africa
Scholars have long argued social diversity, and electoral institutions interactively shape party systems: diversity has little effect on the effective number of parties (ENP) in single member plurality (SMP) systems but increases ENP in proportional ones. We argue instead that where diversity is salient enough to generate demand for parties, it also hinders strategic coordination, preventing SMP rules from reducing the number of parties and produ…
Land and Legibility: When Do Citizens Expect Secure Property Rights in Weak States
Legibility and political authority are often conflated in debates over formalization processes, including land titling. This can lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is that citizens anticipate would strengthen their property rights. This study examines the effects of legibility on citizens' evaluations of property rights in Malawi, a country with limited but increasing land titling. We argue that legibility is a strategic resource f…
Gifts, threats, and perceptions of ballot secrecy in African elections
Are contingent electoral strategies, like vote buying and intimidation, effective in Africa? No, according to recent scholarship: unlike parties in other developing regions like Latin America, African parties lack the capacity to violate ballot secrecy and force voters to stick to their end of the bargain. Voters can therefore “defect” and vote their conscience. We challenge this perspective. Recent Afrobarometer data show that nearly one in four…
Iterative Approaches toR×CEcological Inference Problems: Where They Can Go Wrong and One Quick Fix
This article argues that a key step in King's iterative approach toR×Cecological inference problems—the aggregation of groups into broad conglomerate categories—can introduce problems of aggregation bias and multimodality into data, inducing model violations. As a result, iterative EI estimates can be considerably biased, even when the original data conform to the assumptions of the model. I demonstrate this problem intuitively and through simula…
The ABCs of Covid-19 prevention in Malawi: Authority, benefits, and costs of compliance
Mixed records, complexity, and ethnic voting in African elections
Choice and Choice Set in African Elections
Studies of voting behavior usually start with voters, theorizing how voter psychology or preferences shape choice. But what if choice sets predetermine choice? This article argues for a reorientation of how we think about voting behavior, from an exclusive focus on microfoundations to one acknowledging structure. It does so through the lens of African coethnic voting. Using data sets matching vote choice with candidate characteristics in Kenyan, …
Stigma, Trust, and procedural integrity: Covid-19 testing in Malawi
Between Science and Engineering: Reflections on the Apsa Presidential Task Force on Political Science, Electoral Rules, and Democratic Governance
Political scientists have contributed to the world of electoral systems as scientists and as engineers. Taking stock of recent scientific research, we show that context modifies the effects of electoral rules on political outcomes in specific and systematic ways. We explore how electoral rules shape the inclusion of women and minorities, the depth and nature of political competition, and patterns of redistribution and regulation, and we consider …
Symptoms and Stereotypes: Perceptions and Responses to Covid-19 in Malawi and Zambia
A large literature documents Covid-19’s health and economic effects. We focus instead on its political impact and its potential to exacerbate identity divisions, in particular. Psychologists argue that contagious disease increases threat perceptions and provokes policing of group boundaries. We explore how insider-outsider status and symptoms of illness shape perceptions of infection, reported willingness to help, and desire to restrict free move…
Institutional duration and growth in Africa
Fiscal Policy Outcomes and Electoral Accountability in American States
Clear fiscal policy effects appear in American state gubernatorial and legislative elections between 1968 and 1992, independent of the effects of incumbency, coattails, term limits, and macroeconomic conditions. The results show that accountability is generally stronger following a period of unified party control than under divided government. Voter reactions to taxes and spending relative to the state economy are conditional on expectations, whi…
Iterative Approaches toR×CEcological Inference Problems: Where They Can Go Wrong and One Quick Fix
This article argues that a key step in King's iterative approach toR×Cecological inference problems—the aggregation of groups into broad conglomerate categories—can introduce problems of aggregation bias and multimodality into data, inducing model violations. As a result, iterative EI estimates can be considerably biased, even when the original data conform to the assumptions of the model. I demonstrate this problem intuitively and through simula…
Institutional duration and growth in Africa
Explaining South Africa's Racial Census
In all South African elections since 1994, race has been an overwhelming predictor of voting behavior for most of the South African electorate. This paper evaluates three explanations for this outcome: an expressive hypothesis, which sees voting as an act of identity expression; a politics-as-usual approach, which points to standard factors like policy preferences or performance evaluations; and a racial heuristics approach, which suggests that v…
Transformation and Trouble: Crime, Justice, and Participation in Democratic South Africa
Transformation and Trouble: Crime, Justice, and Participation in Democratic South Africa. By Diana Gordon. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006. 400p. $78.00 cloth, $28.95 paper. When the African National Congress (ANC) took power in South Africa after the first open elections in 1994, the goals of its leaders were ambitious: In addition to securing liberal rights and institutions, the party sought to address the socioeconomic needs …
Framing the Race in South Africa: The Political Origins of Racial Census Elections
Ties that bind? The rise and decline of ethno-regional partisanship in Malawi, 1994–2009
In the first three elections following Malawi's return to democracy in 1993, voting patterns displayed a clear ethno-regional pattern. Then in 2009 the regional pattern broke down in dramatic fashion, with the incumbent President, Bingu wa Mutharika, attracting majority support across all three regions. This article first examines whether ethnic identities were at the root of Malawi's ethno-regional electoral pattern. Our tests show that while et…
The Social Origins of Electoral Volatility in Africa
This article utilizes the statistical analysis of an original dataset of African legislative seat volatility levels and three case studies to demonstrate that the size and configuration of politically salient ethnic groups bear a strong relationship with patterns of legislative seat volatility in Africa. Legislative seat volatility is highest in countries where either no social group is large enough to form a majority on its own, or a majority gr…
How Fluid Is Fluid? The Mutability of Ethnic Identities and Electoral Volatility in Africa
This chapter proposes and tests an argument about how much fluidity we should expect in activated ethnic identity categories in electoral politics. It has now become commonplace to assert that ethnic identities are constructed, fluid, and responsive to political, social, and economic contexts including elections. But how fluid are they? How easily can political entrepreneurs fighting elections construct new ethnic groupings? Not very easily, this…
Between Science and Engineering: Reflections on the Apsa Presidential Task Force on Political Science, Electoral Rules, and Democratic Governance
Political scientists have contributed to the world of electoral systems as scientists and as engineers. Taking stock of recent scientific research, we show that context modifies the effects of electoral rules on political outcomes in specific and systematic ways. We explore how electoral rules shape the inclusion of women and minorities, the depth and nature of political competition, and patterns of redistribution and regulation, and we consider …
Kenya’s 2013 Elections: Choosing Peace over Democracy
Kenya's 2013 Elections:Choosing Peace over Democracy James D. Long (bio), Karuti Kanyinga (bio), Karen E. Ferree (bio), and Clark Gibson (bio) On 4 March 2013, roughly 12.3 million voters went to the polls in Kenya. After a protracted counting process with clear irregularities, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) declared sitting deputy prime minister Uhuru Kenyatta of The National Alliance (TNA) and the Jubilee Coalition t…
Context, Electoral Rules, and Party Systems
To address concerns over the applicability of the electoral system literature to new and developing democracies, we present a framework for understanding the interplay between electoral rules and social, economic, and political context. This framework emphasizes that context typically shapes what we call the “behavioral” linkage between electoral rules and outcomes; moreover, the longer the causal chain connecting electoral rules to outcomes, the…
Voting behavior and electoral irregularities in Kenya's 2013 Election
Data from a unique nationwide exit poll of 6258 voters are employed to explore two central themes of the 2013 Kenyan Election: (1) the correlates of individual vote choice; and (2) the credibility of the electoral process. The analysis reveals several striking relationships between an individual's vote choice, personal attributes, and perceptions of the campaign and candidates. We find that the leading coalitions mostly kept their co-ethnics toge…
Who’s Asking? Interviewer Coethnicity Effects in African Survey Data
Face-to-face interviews constitute a social interaction between interviewer and respondent, and in the African context, social interactions are strongly shaped by ethnicity. Yet research using African survey data typically fails to account for the effect of shared ethnicity on survey responses. We find that respondents give systematically different answers to coethnic and noncoethnic interviewers across surveys in 14 African countries, but with s…
Gifts, threats, and perceptions of ballot secrecy in African elections
Are contingent electoral strategies, like vote buying and intimidation, effective in Africa? No, according to recent scholarship: unlike parties in other developing regions like Latin America, African parties lack the capacity to violate ballot secrecy and force voters to stick to their end of the bargain. Voters can therefore “defect” and vote their conscience. We challenge this perspective. Recent Afrobarometer data show that nearly one in four…
Electoral Systems in Context: South Africa
South Africa’s post-apartheid election outcomes demonstrate how contextual factors interact with electoral rules to shape party systems. South Africa’s national electoral system represents one of the most permissive in the world, combining parliamentary rules with an extreme form of proportional representation. These rules were selected to encourage broad representation of parties in the National Assembly. However, South Africa’s party system con…
Why the salience of social divisions matters in party systems: Testing the interactive hypothesis in South Africa
Scholars have long argued social diversity, and electoral institutions interactively shape party systems: diversity has little effect on the effective number of parties (ENP) in single member plurality (SMP) systems but increases ENP in proportional ones. We argue instead that where diversity is salient enough to generate demand for parties, it also hinders strategic coordination, preventing SMP rules from reducing the number of parties and produ…
The ABCs of Covid-19 prevention in Malawi: Authority, benefits, and costs of compliance
Election Ink and Turnout in a Partial Democracy
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Mixed records, complexity, and ethnic voting in African elections
Stigma, Trust, and procedural integrity: Covid-19 testing in Malawi
Choice and Choice Set in African Elections
Studies of voting behavior usually start with voters, theorizing how voter psychology or preferences shape choice. But what if choice sets predetermine choice? This article argues for a reorientation of how we think about voting behavior, from an exclusive focus on microfoundations to one acknowledging structure. It does so through the lens of African coethnic voting. Using data sets matching vote choice with candidate characteristics in Kenyan, …
Symptoms and Stereotypes: Perceptions and Responses to Covid-19 in Malawi and Zambia
A large literature documents Covid-19’s health and economic effects. We focus instead on its political impact and its potential to exacerbate identity divisions, in particular. Psychologists argue that contagious disease increases threat perceptions and provokes policing of group boundaries. We explore how insider-outsider status and symptoms of illness shape perceptions of infection, reported willingness to help, and desire to restrict free move…
Land and Legibility: When Do Citizens Expect Secure Property Rights in Weak States
Legibility and political authority are often conflated in debates over formalization processes, including land titling. This can lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is that citizens anticipate would strengthen their property rights. This study examines the effects of legibility on citizens' evaluations of property rights in Malawi, a country with limited but increasing land titling. We argue that legibility is a strategic resource f…
Using Communications Technology to Promote Democratic Participation: Experimental Evidence from South Africa
We present a national-scale effort to use technology to promote political participation in an emerging democracy, South Africa. A multichannel digital platform registering more than 90,000 South African citizens conducted opinion polling, crowdsourced information on electoral activities, and enabled citizen monitoring of polling places during the 2014 general election. Different channels display starkly distinct demographic profiles and patterns …
Political science (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Politics (22 works) · Law (18 works) · Economics (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Democracy (11 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (10 works) · Political economy (9 works) · Voting (9 works)